Last week we wondered if the acquisition of Yammer would finally lead to the social functionality boon SharePoint users dream of, but today’s headlines suggest that Microsoft could still be well behind the curve. The topic of the hour is mobile-only collaboration, brought to you by DoubleDutch and their new workgroup collaboration app, Pride.
Each object within Pride (projects, customers, documents, locations, etc.) has its own feed, and interacting with these feeds essentially builds activity around them while you’re on the go — and only when you’re on the go. The company claims taking this extreme route dropped the internal use of email by up to 34%.
The trick is structured data. “Because we’re mobile only, we depend very heavily on context,” explained CEO Lawrence Coburn. For example: “All our customers are tagged with latitude and longitude data.” This allows the app know when you’re at a client’s place of business, prompting a checkin. Colleagues will know exactly what you’re working on, exactly when you’re working on it.
It all sounds well and good, and I like a mobile app just as much as the next person, but I wonder whether or not the mobile-only approach will really stick. Tech kids from every corner of the Web have prematurely called/heard the death of e-mail, the end of the desktop, etc. and plenty of research tells us today’s rise in mobile is just the beginning, but are we really ready to give up our work stations?
If you’re using both a mobile and desktop approach to collaboration, tell us in the comments below when the latter makes more sense, and whether or not you think you could live without it.