Watching digital collaboration evolve: Key events over the last year

The hottest process since agile development, DevOps is bringing a new collaborative sensibility to technical teams. It got onto the agenda of nearly two-thirds of organizations in the last year.

Related: Closing the gap between executives and digital transformation

The OpenSocial Foundation moved into the W3C Social Web Working Group at the end of 2014, hopefully the start of the the end of social collaboration silos which are impeding business progress with collaboration.

Technique likes working out loud are a key part of an important new set of collaborative skills that workers must acquire to be effective in the modern digital workplace. Working Out Loud week last November was an attempt to get past the technology  of collaboration and into the actual human skills required to create more effective and engaged workplaces.

The talk of the collaboration industry over the last year has been Slack, which has made team collaboration exciting again and created a round of imitators seeking to replicate its rapidly attained $2.8B valuation.

Microsoft has long had middle-of-the-road intellectual thinking behind its tools, but took things to the next level when Bryan Goode walked the industry through their thinking for dynamic teams with Office Graph and Office Groups.

Jane McConnell's respected work last year in her Digital Workplace Trends report showed the there was a major jump in enterprise social network adoption last year, making social collaboration a reality at most large companies.

The pressure by the rise of Slack, real-time messaging services, and mobile collaboration apps challenged the social business industry in a significant way, but there's no real comparison, or even, competition. It's more likely they will co-exist.

Related: How social business grew up

There has been a lot of excitement and new entries in the collaboration space recently, but not always a lot of real innovation. Time will tell who is offering notable breakthroughs.

Collaboration Tools Listed

- Beam Messenger

- Confide

-  Cotap

- Eko

- Facebook at Work

- Flow

- Glip

- Incentive

- Jive Chime

- Redeapp

- Slack

- Slingshot

- TigerText

Related: 20 contemporary collaboration tools

The value of digital collaboration is significant, if one can get through the cultural, process, and behavioral changes. Some organizations reported real progress this year as well.

Related: How much can technology actually improve collaboration?