Top 12 Enterprise Online Collaboration Tools in 2023

As of 2023, Mio no longer supports Universal Channels. For more information on our current product offerings, please visit our website.

Today, we are launching Mio Universal Channels to enable intercompany collaboration. They are like Slack’s shared channels, but cross-platform.

If you use Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Webex, then you can create a Mio Universal Channel and invite your external business contacts to join the channel by sending them a link.

You can stay in your preferred team collaboration app, and they can stay in theirs.

Workplace communications trends

The biggest trend in workplace communications over the past five years has been the shift towards using team collaboration apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams for internal communication between colleagues at the same company.

We believe the big trend over the next five years will be using those same team collaboration apps for external communication with clients, vendors, and partners.

Today, if you work for a technology company, almost all internal communication with colleagues happens via real-time messaging.

However, almost all communication with external business contacts is via email.

There’s a simple reason for this:

Everybody uses a different platform

You probably don’t know which team collaboration app most of your clients and partners are using. Even if you do, it’s most likely they are not using the same team collaboration app as you.

Until now, the only alternative to email was to add your external contacts as guest users, which creates an administrative burden and creates a security risk.

If you’ve ever been added as a guest user to another company’s Microsoft Teams tenant or Slack workspace, you’ll know it’s an unsatisfactory experience. It adds another workspace to check for new messages.

Changing the fragmented intercompany collaboration experience

Today is the start of a new era for intercompany collaboration.

You and all of your business contacts will be able to communicate in real-time by using Mio Universal Channels.

Everyone can stay within their preferred team collaboration app.

Each universal channel generates a unique link that can be shared with others to invite them to join from either Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Webex.

The advantages of bringing real-time messaging capabilities to intercompany collaboration are clear.

Messaging can help sales teams close deals faster. Lawyers serve clients better. And consultants deliver on projects faster.

You’ll never email them again.

Like shared channels, but cross-platform

From a single shared channel to Slack Connect for up to 20 organizations, Slack has led the way in promoting channel-based communication between Slack customers.

The success of Slack’s shared channels has fundamentally changed the way that tens of thousands of companies work together.

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, advocates for channel-based communication as the future of intercompany collaboration.

“The increase in transparency, in alignment, the shared history equally accessible to everyone regardless of when they join the project — channels bring all of that to teams of people that are working across organizational boundaries.”

Slack obviously isn’t the only game in town. Cisco frequently touts federation between companies that use Webex as one of their unique differentiators.

At Microsoft Ignite in March 2021, Teams Connect was announced as Microsoft introduces its own federation capabilities that will connect different Microsoft Teams customers later this year.

The big challenge with Slack, Cisco, and Microsoft’s approach to federation is that both companies must be using the same app. In the fragmented team collaboration space, that’s unlikely.

A unified network for workplace communications

Universal channels are the biggest step forward for intercompany collaboration since the invention of email.

We are now closer than we’ve ever been to connecting every company in the world together on a global network for workplace communications.

We think of Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Webex as Local Area Networks and Mio as the Wide Area Network.

By enabling cross-platform communication between different companies, universal channels will quickly become the primary way you communicate with your clients, partners, freelance contractors, investors, marketing agencies, and lawyers.

Learn more at www.m.io.

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