Microsoft named as a Leader in Forrester’s 2016 Enterprise Collaboration Wave

Microsoft was named as a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Enterprise Collaboration, Q4 2016 report which was released recently. Unlike many other vendors, Microsoft believes that users will independently select collaboration tools, such as content, voice, conference, and team collaboration, based on their preferences and the application’s context. Forrester mentioned the following about Microsoft in their report.

Microsoft’s strategy starts with this premise: No single collaboration app can meet all of today’s employee needs. This has led it to offer a loosely coupled set of collaboration tools. For example, heavy Outlook users in teams of less than 100 will use groups in Outlook; document-centric collaboration remains in SharePoint team sites; Yammer suits relatively unstructured enterprisewide communication; while real-time communication takes place in Skype for Business.

Yammer is a core component of the Office 365 suite and the choice for connecting across organizations and for broad enterprise collaboration functions, but collaboration will increasingly take place in applications integrated with Office 365 Groups, with conversations, files, calendars, and notes as basic functions. Office 365 Groups sit at the center of Microsoft’s vision: Group members become objects in Azure Active Directory, where administration and connectors to other services are strongest. Microsoft excelled across all the categories we evaluated except templates, communities, and application integration. Near-term investments will aid further integration with Office 365. Today, Yammer sends signals to Microsoft Graph and uses Graph to recommend groups and people to follow. Microsoft plans to add signals like conversations and files in the future. Delve incorporates links shared in Yammer for greater discovery across Office 365 and will soon enable inline conversations so that colleagues can share and discuss any content in Yammer directly from within the Delve experience.

You can read and download the full Forrester Wave: Enterprise Collaboration, Q4 2016 report.