Has Microsoft just redefined collaboration? Introducing Project Gigjam
Microsoft may have just built a collaborative digital canvas, and perhaps introduced a new way of collaborating. Customers, partners and competitors should pay close attention.
Let's say you're an account executive and you have an urgent customer issue you need to resolve. A typical process for this common scenario may involve email messages, the customer support ticket, the customer record (CRM), information about inventory (ERP) and prices, and a few other tools like chat, video conferencing and more.
How do you bring all that information together to combine into a single story? How do you share that with the people that need to be involved to resolve the issue? How do you make sure each person involved only has access to the part of the scenario that's related to them? How do you record the entire workflow so you can leverage the information again later?
It's such a typical scenario but one that does not have a very efficient or effective solution. Today, we have email, social networks, screenshots, web-conferencing, task management and a long list of other tools, but none allow teams to easily collaborate while at the same time ensuring people only have access to their own part of the workflow.
If you've followed my work over the last few years, you've heard me talk about collaborative digital canvases. Well, Microsoft may have just built one, and perhaps introduced a new way of collaborating.
Gigjam is an application that runs on your PC or mobile device. The owner of the "gig" starts with a blank canvas, then adds containers to each of the pieces of information required for the given scenario. In the screenshot below, on the left there is container showing customer records from Microsoft Dynamics (it could be from any CRM system, ex: Salesforce) and on the right inventory information from SAP. These two applications are linked together based on the customer name, so as the CRM record on the left changes, the right side updates accordingly. The link was created simply by clicking the blue link button at the bottom. No coding was required and no field mapping or SQL queries needed to be written.
Project Gigjam is the latest in the series of moves that Microsoft is making as they focus on personal and team productivity. Customers, partners and competitors should pay close attention as the concepts in Gigjam could play a large part in shaping the future of way people work.