AnotherPlace - This was a sensitive word with the OnePlace founding team. They did not want to hear that their OnePlace social software for teams could easily be delegated as “AnotherPlace”. I joined the OnePlace team one year ago as a business development consultant and, of course, I had to challenge the product’s value. Collaboration is cool, but is it worth the hassle of another software application, and another subscription? As I came up to speed on Social Business Software space, I looked at dozens of applications that were developed to enhance team performance while leveraging the social aspects of popular interfaces like Facebook and Twitter, they all were AnotherPlace: each valuable in their own right, but not critical tools.

Now as a part Bluewater, 22 people are using OnePlace daily to various degrees. For some it replaces the network drive where files used to be stored. Others use it to share their daily conquests, collaborate and/or manage their daily workloads. This morning I received a team activity report from OnePlace that showed OP usage by individual and the overall team; the numbers were impressive and the range of usage by team member is wide. User adoption is very individualistic in collaborative solutions and that is okay, as long as every user sees value in participating in the discussion.

In the new software model, solutions are casually brought in by the team, and users are not forced to adopt them. Rather users now need to find value on their own terms. The new model isn’t all or nothing, instead value is driven at an individual level, and team adoption reflects that. For everyone on our team the consensus is that OnePlace isn’t AnotherPlace, rather it has become ThePlace for team social and work activity.

Today's guest post comes from Lokesh Datta, a co-founder of All Collaboration. Focusing on collaboration, All Collaboration offers points-of-view, original research, reviews of products and services, interviews with industry luminaries, and the “best of” articles on the web. All Collaboration has a companion Discussion Group on LinkedIn. Follow Lokesh on Twitter: @LDatta.

People collaborate, tools don’t! We hear this admonition often and, in fact, I plead guilty to using it as well. Is that sufficient, however, for successful collaboration? Not really! People and tools are both necessary but not sufficient. Effective collaboration requires a holistic approach, consisting of: Purpose, People, Process and Place.

What happens if any one of these is lacking is detail, clarity or fit?

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