Using Multiple Enterprise Collaboration Tools? Top Tips to Manage Them

The larger your business, the more collaboration tools you have. That’s a general rule of thumb that scales to the point of unmanageable administration, shadow IT, and workplace silos. Sure, you could enforce a single platform approach (aka an enterprise collaboration system). But how do you know when that’s the best option?

Rather than letting your collaboration tools spiral out of control, follow these five processes to manage multiple apps and encourage better collaboration in your enterprise.

Why Use an Enterprise Collaboration System?

When you push any change onto humans, you will be met with great resistance. In the case of collaboration tools, you have super users and super fans who know their way around the app so much that it would be detrimental to their working day.

Following the self-service style approach of collaboration app adoption during the pandemic and onwards, apps like Slack and Zoom gained popularity inside even the most Microsoft-only organizations.

In some cases, a best-of-suite approach has led to multiple apps appearing for different use cases across departments. The result is two, three, four, or more communication tools in siloed areas of your business. Which is fine until those users need to communicate across departments.

That’s where questions start to arise:

• Does the sales team meet on Teams or Webex?
• What happens if you send a Slack message to accounts?
• How long should you wait until marketing replies to your Zoom chat?

What’s created here is an uncollaborative working environment. The opposite of your goal when purchasing these apps in the first place.

There’s also the headache of managing these apps. Not only are your users experiencing delays in their day-to-day communications, but you also have support tickets, contract renewals, and constant security and compliance tasks to juggle.

Here are five processes to manage multiple apps.

1) Audit What Apps Are Really Being Used

Creating a clear view of app usage

The first step you must take is discovery. There’s no point in beginning a complex project to consolidate or integrate if you don’t have a clear view of what’s in play. Conduct an audit by surveying users, interviewing department heads, and using app discovery software.

When creating your surveys, make it clear that this is an open forum where nobody can get in trouble for using unsanctioned apps. The goal of this research is to discover what is in use, rather than chastising people for using something that they shouldn’t.

Communicate that you’re not trying to catch people out

While interviewing department heads, make them aware of the same rationale. You’re not there to find out who’s been using unapproved apps. It’s a genuine information intake and a good chance for IT to understand what’s in use and why. The bigger picture here is that some users might get long-term approval if the apps are needed, secure, and cost-effective. A good exercise here is to walk through a typical day-in-the-life of a user in a specific department. Showing rather than telling is always best.

If you choose to use software to discover what’s on an employee’s devices, you may experience pushback. The feeling of privacy invasion is overwhelming if you’re not used to something that tracks your usage. Make sure you communicate that you’re only checking for app usage and that there won’t be any repercussions.

You may also discover that apps you’re paying for are not in use. While something may have been a must-have at the time of purchase, it could have since been replaced and is still costing your business money.

2) Consolidate Where It Makes Sense

Understand what purpose each app serves

Is one app simply replicating the functionality of the other? Are you missing out on the benefits of an enterprise collaboration system by hosting too many apps?

If there is no genuine difference in the way you use two platforms, there is justification to remove one.

That said, vendors have had to work hard to differentiate collaboration tools to remain competitive in an overloaded market. For example, while Microsoft Teams and Zoom both offer meetings as their core functionality, there are many niche use cases and features.

Consider aspects outside of productivity

With security in mind, removal of one or more tools may be mandatory. For example, processing payments in a PCI-compliant manner will mean that a platform that doesn’t enable this must be removed.

When you have a thorough understanding of what collaboration tools are being used, take steps to start reducing the least used ones unless there’s a good reason not to. At this stage, it’s common for enterprises to reduce from four or five apps down to two or three.

3) Understand Your Integration Options

Integration is easier than ever

Nearly every collaboration tool pushes its open APIs and integration options as its best features. Rightly so, too. The ability to use line-of-business and project or task management apps inside your collaboration tools is extremely popular and often conducive to higher productivity levels.

Microsoft is focused on integrating its own vast suite into Teams. With SharePoint being the backbone for documents, Teams is the front end. Likewise, other productivity apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel can all be launched from inside Teams.

But the same is true for other calling and meeting apps. You can now make a call using Cisco Calling, Zoom Phone, or whoever your calling provider is, with the Teams app as the interface. The same is true across all the major apps, like Salesforce, with marketplaces or app stores with competitor products commonplace.

Shop app stores and speak to vendors

It’s more than worth browsing your providers’ app stores to see which apps integrate. Also, speak to your account manager about other integration options that might not be as public.

While tradition dictates that competitors shy away from talking about each other, there has been a shift in direction. The realization that happy customers are more likely to continue spending money has led to putting customer requirements ahead of ensuring vendor lock-in.

For example, you could use Nextiva’s integration for Microsoft Teams to continue using the Teams interface while benefiting from Nextiva’s telephony features.

While Teams stays as the front end, you get access to PBX features like:

• Call routing
• Call flows
• Call groups
• Advanced call analytics
• Native call recording and transcription

While available in Teams, these features require third-party integration or significant configuration anyway. Choosing a complete cloud-based phone solution to power the back end often makes more sense.

As you can see below, everything looks the same. Simply, the underlying phone system has changed.

4) Consider Interoperability Middleware vs Consolidation

Interoperability middleware

For the collaboration tools you choose to keep, either by demand or by choice, spend time assessing what interoperability options are available to bring them together and create productive workflows.

Depending on your combination of existing collaboration tools, several tools allow users in different departments to send messages or make calls between apps. For example, if the marketing team uses Slack but the sales team uses Microsoft Teams, and you’re keeping both, this middleware allows users to stay in their preferred platform, continue to do their best work, and send messages without the need to constantly switch platforms.

Consolidating into a single platform

The alternative here is choosing not to keep both enterprise collaboration platforms and saving yourself the extra costs of adding another tool to connect them.

Here, you may choose to stick with one of your many platforms. But it’s also possible that another option serves your requirements better.

Factor	Interoperability Middleware	Single Platform Consolidation
Initial cost	Lower upfront (keep existing tools)	Higher upfront (migration + new licenses)
Ongoing costs	Higher long-term (multiple licenses + middleware costs)	Lower long-term (single license, reduced IT overhead)
Complexity management	High — managing multiple platforms and integrations	Low — one platform to manage
User experience	Inconsistent across different platforms	Consistent across the business
Data integration	Complex data synchronization between systems	Native integration with unified data model
Security/compliance	Multiple security models to manage	Single framework

Collaboration tools, like the NextivaONE app, exist to bring all employees and communication channels together.

You get access to features like:

• Internal calling
• External PSTN calling
• Scheduled and ad-hoc meetings
• Instant messaging and asynchronous chat
• Conversation overview in a single place
• Google/Outlook calendar integration
• Call recording and voicemail transcription
• Display of contact details and notes in a conversation
• Automatic saving of files, recordings, and links
• Note-taking for all contacts and conversations
• Contact center functionality like omnichannel, SMS, and social media

5) Schedule Regular Audits to Celebrate Adoption

The main culprit for businesses undoing their hard work when it comes to management of multiple collaboration tools (or a new single platform) is the lack of follow-up.

It’s a great first step to conduct an audit, streamline, and work through consolidation or interoperability options. But collaboration technology innovation is driven by demand, curiosity, and the art of the possible. If a new app appears and does something everybody thinks they need, you can bet its adoption will be greater than your mandated team collaboration tools.

Think about scheduling a quarterly or yearly review of the collaboration tools in use inside your business. Making a user survey a common occurrence will lead to honesty and flexibility in the long run. As you consolidate further, you will experience the benefits but also the challenges of running fewer platforms. This is a crucial learning path for both IT and procurement teams.

Treating collaboration tool management as a one-time exercise is an error made by businesses time and again.

If you use external consultants, this can be expensive and off-putting. A six-figure bill to save money can be avoided by keeping discovery, management, and enablement in-house. It’s not uncommon for enterprises to create a role specifically for IT app usage and optimization.

When executed correctly, the five-step approach of audit, consolidate, integrate, review, and consolidate again works wonders for collaboration tool cost optimization, employee productivity, and your bottom line.

Tips for Managing an Enterprise Collaboration System

Whether you choose to consolidate to a single platform straight away or keep several in play to begin with, there are some ground rules and best practices to help you from day one:

• Establish clear guidelines for usage: As part of your business process, lay out when to use each type of technology (meeting, chat, call, etc.) so expectations are consistent among all team members. Get stakeholders from each department on your side early so they become product champions.
• Embrace asynchronous communications: Save on miscommunication by adopting asynchronous chats with good written communication skills. Vague voicemails and calling meetings without context often get replaced by a solid message. Avoid communication bottlenecks by sending one longer message instead of going back and forth with multiple messages.

• Appreciate that onboarding and offboarding will be different experiences: You may not be able to streamline migration as users favor their own platform. Make it part of your collaboration strategy to communicate why changes are being made and highlight key benefits. Introduce initiatives like gamification that reward top users.
• Regularly update training materials: Share information about new features as they become available. Exposing staff to new functionality without appropriate education could end in poor usage.
• Manage new features: While any change is designed to boost productivity, immediate rollout can have negative consequences. Decide when different departments get access to new functionality or whether you roll it out at all.
• Embrace automation: In the digital workplace, there are tons of manual tasks that will benefit from automation. Learn which enterprise collaboration tools offer workflow optimization for both real-time communication and behind-the-scenes tasks like file sharing and video conferencing transcription.

Nextiva’s Enterprise Collaboration System: A Single Platform Approach

Managing multiple collaboration tools in an enterprise is a tough ask. Thanks to the proliferation of tools and the ever-increasing scope of the market, getting a handle on things won’t happen overnight.

If you’re simply no longer able to juggle the onslaught of tools in your enterprise collaboration strategy, it’s a clear sign to consolidate to a single platform.

While we don’t suggest this is a big bang approach (that’s like tearing off a Band-Aid from a seeping wound), it does make sense to phase out lesser-used or lesser-supported solutions.

For true unified communications — often the goal for large organizations — one platform to rule them all is the best way forward.

If you opt for an enterprise collaboration system, Nextiva comes into its own. You optimize teamwork and collaboration while getting a secure and consistent administrative experience.

• 99.999% uptime and availability
• Eight points of presence for geographical redundancy
• End-to-end encryption for voice calls
• Centralized admin dashboard for user management
• Bulk user provisioning and management
• Local and toll-free phone numbers
• Call recording and transcription
• Advanced call routing with auto attendants, IVRs, etc.
• HD video meetings with screen sharing and annotations
• In-person meeting room integration
• Project management tools and workspaces to improve remote work
• Task management, knowledge sharing, and file storage
• Async collaboration to boost employee engagement
• Usage dashboards to help with business decision-making

If the single-platform approach is right for your enterprise collaboration system, Nextiva is a wise choice. Want to see it in action? Book your tailored demo of Nextiva here. 👇