Even prior to the coronavirus outbreak, there was broad interest in collaborative whiteboards as a way to enrich meetings and to bring concepts visually to life in a shared medium that can exist beyond the confines of a conference room. Now that distributed work is the norm, the demand for collaborative whiteboards has grown astronomically.

The leading solutions go far beyond shared drawings on a digital canvas to leverage social communications found in other work technologies—such as commenting, chat, @-mentioning, and video conferencing. These collaborative whiteboards also boast sophisticated integrations with other enterprise software, in particular file sharing apps, productivity tools, and work management solutions. Even the lowly Post-It Note takes on powerful elements of shared design and communication in its digital version.

The capabilities of these collaborative, digital whiteboards are so profound that I’m compelled to coin a term for them: “workboards.” While you’ll see other names used by vendors in this space—”digital workspaces for visual collaboration” and “virtual work platforms” among them—in this report we’ll refer to them generally as collaborative whiteboards or workboards.

Evolving Sector

The demand for collaborative whiteboards has been fueled by the widespread adoption of distributed and remote work environments in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has left teams unable to gather in conference rooms or other shared physical spaces to brainstorm, hash out product plans, or conduct project retrospectives.

The initial use case for these tools—provide a whiteboarding experience with a digital emulation—focused primarily on synchronous co-authoring among team members with the digital equivalents of sticky notes, pens, and erasers. However, over time it became clear that asynchronous creation, management, and sharing of information on virtual canvases has become at least as important a use case.

Whiteboards are an additional class of collaboration software with some degree of overlap with established collaboration tools like work chat (such as Slack and Microsoft Teams), video conferencing (like Zoom and Google Meet), file-sharing platforms (like Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive), and other kinds of software. As a result, integration with other software platforms is a major aspect of workboards’ value proposition and one of the key emerging trends in the marketplace.

Several of the products reviewed in this research started as collaborative whiteboards for large-format, touch-sensitive displays intended for real-time cooperative use within conference rooms. These include Microsoft Whiteboard developed for the Microsoft Surface Hub display, and Google Jam developed for the Google Jamboard. Because of the rapid migration to distributed work, companies are generally using web-browser versions of workboards, which is influencing the direction of product development significantly.

One emerging workboard trend is: Smart, model-based templates that act as a canvas that encode step-by-step processes for teams to capture the various elements of a business model. They can also be used as a project retrospective template that encourages—or requires—information to be added and evaluated according to company policies. Some market-leading vendors have developed dozens, and in some cases, hundreds of these templates. These go far beyond snapping sticky notes to a grid; they can reorganize elements on a template based on rules, calculations, voting, or other criteria.

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The departure these next-generation “digital whiteboards” represent from their analog starting point is so profound that I’m tempted to coin a name for this emergent category—workboards. And while we will use this term and collaborative whiteboards throughout this report, it’s worth noting that many of the vendors in this space describe their digital whiteboards as “digital workspaces for visual collaboration” or “virtual work platforms,” among other variations.

Key Findings

The demand for digital whiteboard platforms has been accelerated by the increased level of distributed work (or remote work) caused by the coronavirus, denying people the ability to pull a team into a conference room to brainstorm, lay out a product plan, or to undertake a project retrospective.

The initial use case for these tools was to implement a whiteboarding experience with a digital emulation, and particularly the collaborative experience of synchronous co-authoring among team members with the digital equivalents of sticky notes, pens, and erasers. Since then, asynchronous creation, management, and information sharing on virtual canvases have emerged as a primary use case. The result: These digital whiteboards (or workboards) increasingly must serve use cases that span work-from-home, work-in-office, synchronous, and asynchronous scenarios.

Workboards are an additional class of collaboration software with some degree of overlap with more well-known kinds of collaboration tools, like work chat (such as Slack and Microsoft Teams), video conferencing (like Zoom and Google Meet), file-sharing platforms (like Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive), and many other kinds of software. As a result, integration with other software platforms is a major aspect of the workboard value proposition and one of the key emerging trends in the marketplace.

Several of the products reviewed in this research started as collaborative whiteboards for large-format, touch-sensitive displays intended for real-time cooperative use within conference rooms. These include Microsoft Whiteboard developed for the Microsoft Surface Hub display, and Google Jam developed for the Google Jamboard. Because of the rapid migration to distributed work, companies are generally using web-browser versions of collaborative whiteboards, influencing these companies’ product directions.

One emerging trend is smart, model-based templates for workboards, such as a canvas that encodes a step-by-step process for a team to capture a business model’s various elements. Or a project retrospective template that encourages—or requires—information to be added and evaluated according to company policies. Many vendors have developed dozens and, in some cases, hundreds of these templates. These go far beyond just snapping sticky notes to a grid. They can reorganize elements on a template based on calculations, voting, or other criteria.

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We are living in a designed world. Most of the things we interact with—aside from people—have been designed: they are not natural. As Jason Severs wrote,

“The world you take for granted every day is being aggressively designed for you by people who don’t know you.”

We should be aware—especially regarding the tools we use to interact with other people—that communication tools are designed, and invariably shape the culture of those groups that adopt them. As a result, the best tools are those that follow Dieter Ram’s dictum:

“Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That’s its role.”

One way that the best designers operate is to get close to the people that are likely users, to approach the process of designing ethnographically. As designer John Payne says, the starting point should be to ask “What are the goals and intentions of the users?” and then design with them, not at them, or for them. Designers of work technologies need to remain aware of the purpose of social interaction: the purposefulness of group social cohesion. And that is the typical failure of badly designed work technologies—they don’t match the needs and goals of the people doing the work.

User experience—and in the enterprise, employee experience—is today held up as a key principle of software design, but there is a huge disparity in the outcomes of these efforts. While the design of enterprise software may be improving, on the whole, there is still a lot of badly realized software in the world. And in the more bounded world of work technologies, there is wide variability even at the starting point of understanding the individuals using the software.

Experience-centered design can’t be limited to the interaction between a single user and the application. It has to mediate the interactions among the users, and inevitably those interactions are shaped by the application. There is an implicit social network latent in the machinery of work technologies, with people communicating and coordinating, sharing and asking, and ultimately, the technology fills the spaces between people, as Mark Earles characterized it.

Part of the design problem may be the domain, which is the world of work, where a wide range of roles can be involved in many scenarios, and so modeling user experience becomes problematic. Other constraints may act as barriers to simple and intuitive user experience, such as the need to integrate with legacy systems, and the considerations related to enterprise security needs.

In the end, when we experience and evaluate tools, we shift back and forth from analysis to intuition, but the intuitive side is most important. As @iconfinder said,

“A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”

Bruno Latour observed that our tools perform social functions, and the most direct measure of the fitness of tools such as work technologies is how well they support our social aims.

The tools that are most likely to be used, and used frequently, are those that best match our social needs. And the better the fit between tool and function, the better they will appear to be designed.

In the very best designs, the tool seems to be the social function, standing out of the way. Consider the touchpad on a laptop: when first exposed to a touchpad, users rapidly come to feel as if their fingers are moving the cursor, and the touchpad itself is forgotten. After that, we only think of the touchpad when it is broken or badly calibrated—otherwise, it drops out of our thinking.

This is the perception I have of the intranet platform Simpplr: the subtleties of its deep design allow users to participate in the activities around communication, coordination, and cooperation that make up so much of the fabric of work, while the machinery underlying Simpplr does not intrude. The result is like our laptop’s touchpad: only the cursor and the finger move, while the touchpad is still, and drops out of our thinking, silently doing its job.

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A concise definition of people analytics is probably called for:

People analytics is the application of data analysis techniques and tools to gain insight into employee performance, engagement, and development, and cultural factors that shape the employee experience.

Of course, performance measures have long been a component of personnel management and human resources, however, in people analytics, the focus is on objective data, to the degree that is possible. People Analytics solutions enable enterprises to pull together the trove of data across current, past, and prospective employees, and to mine insight from sources like financial information, contracts, facilities, and core human resource information systems (HRIS).

In this GigaOm Radar report, we will explore the people analytics market landscape. The report will describe the market categories and deployment types within the people analytics space, and detail how each vendor’s solution performs against a set of relevant key criteria. This analysis will then inform the GigaOm Radar Chart, which provides a powerful, forward-looking visualization of people analytics tools and their expected development.

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This market niche is undergoing rapid growth, as businesses adapt to an “employee experience” mindset and are driven by the desire to move away from highly subjective measurement of the traditional human resource management era to a more objective, data-driven and employee-centric approach to employee performance measurement, employee engagement, and employee development and retention.

This report will outline the decisive criteria for judging people analytics platforms. It describes the base functionality and features—referred to here as table stakes—that are expected of a vendor’s offering in the market, as well as the key criteria that help differentiate the market leaders. The report will also outline how to evaluate a vendor’s performance in relation to an organization’s needs.

Key Findings:

• The market is new and fast paced
• There is a growing need for integration with work, business and human resource information system (HRIS) software to enable deeper analytics
• Table stakes for the market include basic analytics, performance tracking and basic management activities such as reviews and 1 to 1s
• Key criteria for people analytics include full employee lifecycle tracking, support for different employee types, and diversity and inclusion monitoring
• Emerging technologies include what-if scenario planning, combining business and people data, team performance, career development, benchmarking, and automation

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Knowledge-intensive businesses today are confronted by three trends that make effective management and operations problematic:

The drive to automate: We see an increase in efforts to automate as much of the activities surrounding knowledge work as possible now that low-cost and easy-to-use work management solutions offer the means to capture and automate business processes.

The desire for best of breed tools: Different groups within a company are involved in different sorts of work – like marketing versus programming – and these groups will naturally choose different tools to coordinate their own work unless directed to do otherwise. (And if directed to use a management-mandated tool, they might “go rogue” and use a preferred tool, anyway).

Siloing of operations: The first two forces mean that business processes that reach across these groups are fragmented among different representations in different tools. What is needed is the integration and synchronization of these fragmented business processes. That integration is necessary to gain visibility into what is happening in the different groups and connect the execution of cross-group processes. At present, many workers struggle with a collection of disparate tools that are mostly unintegrated, and managers lack understanding about what teams are doing what.

Work Management tools like Trello, Asana, and Jira have become a mainstay of knowledge work, allowing coordination of cooperative work in and across groups, but the three trends described above have led to the need for an additional layer of technology. We see the emergence of a new sort of technology intentionally designed to solve the tensions inherent in these three conflicting trends: Workflow Management.

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Work Management

I have used the term work management for years to differentiate a category of work technologies:

Work management is a term that has emerged in recent years as team task management tools were enhanced with various social communication capabilities, or as project management solutions were enhanced with team task management and social communication.

In the chart below, work management is shown as a task-centric work technology, distinguished from the message- and content-centric work technologies.

Figure 1: Work Technology’s Many Variants

Note that this chart does not show every sort of work technology. Omitted are outward-facing technologies like Customer Service Management (CRM) software, and marketing technology (martech). Likewise, we have not included in this chart a long list of additional work technologies, like employee experience, email, file sync-and-share, and intranets.

As time has passed, work management tools from many leading vendors have become increasingly mature and sophisticated, adding functionality that builds on team task management and additional capabilities in one or more domains. The capabilities can include: project management, automation, social communications, business intelligence, or specialization for specific corporate domains or industries.

As just a few examples, we see a number of products in the work management market that have evolved into sophisticated project work management solutions. These products often include automation capabilities, as well as a list of other advances:

• Incorporate more structured project management features, allowing scaling of large and complex projects
• Support patterns of use like costing and resource management and other sorts of estimation and analysis, including financial analysis
• Deliver business intelligence, like dashboards to visually display status, dependencies, and critical issue notification, targeting management
• Build out use cases for marketing, professional services, software development or engineering

The breadth and depth of what project work management vendors are offering are very broad. It is not practical, therefore, to explore the totality of the features they offer in a comparative way. The exercise relatively quickly becomes an apples-and-oranges problem, because the various solutions are not point-for-point comparable, since one may have deep support for costing and resource management (like Mavenlink), while at the same time, another may focus on deep support for marketing functionality (like Wrike), and a third might be organized around integration with a work chat application (like Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Teams).

Work Management Automation: Definitions and Expectations

For this investigation, we have selected one specific dimension of differentiation — work management automation — and I will be looking into how a shortlist of vendors are supporting business process automation as an adjunct to the baseline features of work management.

I am not investigating automation as a general phenomenon, but looking at it specifically in the context of work management. In this domain, the foundation is task management in the context of business processes. A business process is simply a representation of a logical sequence of events through which some business activity is accomplished: for example, responding to a request for customer support in a product organization.

In the absence of any automation of these processes, people perform the various steps (the individual tasks) manually. That is to say, the person performing each task has to determine what to do based on their understanding of the general idea of the process, given the specific circumstances of the particular case at hand. Put another way, the customer support process has a general flow, but many different outcomes based on the specific customer, the issue they have encountered, and other factors. The rules may be explicit, such as ‘all VIP customers’ support requests are handled by a VIP support representative,’ or the ‘rules’ may be based on tacit knowledge, which may be more vague or subjective.

Automation of a business process at the present day relies a great deal on taking advantage of explicit rules of the sort just outlined. And the implementation of work management automation relies on various bits of information being associated with the business process. One of our hypotheses is that as a general rule, this sort of information will be related to tasks, through custom attributes, or some other kind of ‘case folder.’ So, returning to the customer support example, the customer’s name, the problem description, a support ticket number, and other case-related information follows the task around and is accessible to appropriate team members, who may reassign the task to other people to handle the request for support. Assignment of the task and other information, such as the task status, is also associated with the task and acts as a proxy for the status of the business process as a whole.

Another expectation is that work management automation will follow one or both of two approaches. Some vendors will implement automation as a core, central feature of their offering, while others will opt to integrate with partners’ automation capabilities. Smartsheet, for example, has implemented very sophisticated automation directly within the product. Wrike, on the other hand, is a blend: it implemented a form-based means to initiate automated processes, but for more sophisticated workflows, they have white-labeled Workato’s automation platform, which opens the door to that company’s ecosystem of connected enterprise apps. Other vendors may opt not to support process automation at all.

Over time, it is believed the payoffs from automation will lead beyond work management as a manual means to coordinate work, and the increasing emphasis will shift the center of gravity in the value of work management toward execution and routinization. The following chart represents perhaps the most important hypothesis we will be testing in this research; presuming we see a rapid transition from automation being of secondary importance in enterprise use of work management tools, to primary value being placed on automation.

Figure 2: Transforming Data from Liability to Asset

In this case, the time frame spectrum: near-term is the next one to two years, medium-term is three to five years, and the long-term is five years and longer. Note that in this time horizon chart, the likelihood of probable events is greater than those that are only plausible, which are in turn more likely than merely possible events.

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Shared Inbox = Email-First Customer Communications

A Key Criteria report analyzes the most important features of a technology category to understand how they impact an enterprise and its IT organization. Features are grouped into three categories:

1. Table Stakes
2. Key Criteria
3. Near-term Game-changing Technology

The goal is to help organizations evaluate capabilities and build a mid-to-long-term infrastructure strategy. In a mature technology, the solutions are divided into three target market categories: enterprise, high-performance, and specialized. In a mature market, these differ in their characteristics and how they can be integrated with existing infrastructures. Given that, the evaluation is more dependent on the specific user’s needs and not solely on the organization’s vertical market.

Email and Chat: Operating at Two Tempos

The single most important idea in shared inbox tools is that an email — for example, a request for information or a demo sent to sales@xyzcorp.com — is routed to the social inbox tool as an email object. The members of the sales team can view the email and chat about the subject matter.

So, the email acts as a trigger for action within the organization or team sharing the inbox, which can lead to chat-style messaging among the team.

These are the two tempos: email is sent with the expectation of an asynchronous and possibly slow pace of response, such as a day or two. Meanwhile, within the team receiving the email, the communication is much faster and possibly synchronous: chat. This is shown in the screenshot below, with the email from a customer shown at the top, and the chat between coworkers at the bottom.

Two Architectures

There are two approaches taken in the building of shared inbox tools:

• integrations with existing email clients (like Gmail and Microsoft Office 365) — these have a number of benefits, such as support for other plug-ins and leveraging the scale and reliability of major players.
• standalone email clients (like the example above, from Front) — these can sidestep decisions made in the original tool that might work counter to the needs of shared inbox teams.

The Baseline Use Case

The baseline use case is customer support. An on-line commerce company or software manufacturer wants to be able to handle an incoming stream of customer requests about orders, software bugs, or billing questions, and they may start with a shared account (in say, Gmail), associated with support@adjectivenoun.com. But quickly they run into some of the limitations of a non-shared implementation:

• multiple team members may access the same email and initiate multiple conversations with the customer, causing confusion
• team members may forward customer request emails to other team members asking for assistance, and that ‘pending’ status is not indicated anywhere
• email clients like Gmail do not have a good mechanism for sharing notes, or contact information, so that has to be managed in another context, like a CRM tool

Unsurprisingly, when given the option to use a real shared inbox app, most will transition.

Shared inbox apps differ in the capabilities they offer, but most support these capabilities:

• creation of shared inboxes with actual email addresses, like support@adjectivenoun.com, and giving access to a list of team members
• a chat-like means to communicate among team members while viewing an email (or set of emails)
• a means to create persistent notes regarding specific email cases or customers
• a collection of prepared answers to queries that can be directed to customers as emails or within emails
• the ability to hand off a particular email case to a coworker, like an administrator, payment clerk, or engineer
• assigning a status to a case, such as pending or completed (note that in many cases, these status changes are managed by the system itself)

Of course, there are other use cases, and other scenarios that the vendors have aligned their solutions to match, but this is a good starting point.

These are the dimensions we will use to understand and evaluate shared inbox solutions:

• Standalone or Integrated email client — Is the shared inbox app a standalone app or an integration with email platforms from Google and/or Microsoft? Both types have their pros and cons. As one example, a company may have other services integrated with Gmail that they wish to use on a regular basis which they might have to drop if switching to a standalone shared inbox tool. On the other hand, a standalone app might offer capabilities that are not available or are overly difficult in an integration with Gmail or Outlook.
• Interaction — Central to shared inbox is the interaction with customers through email communications, and perhaps other mechanisms, and chat-link interaction with coworkers.
• Visualization — Is the design of the tool intuitive? Does it provide useful ways to see the process associated with receiving and responding to customer interactions?
• Case management — These solutions generally provide a means to see the cases being handled, and to filter by date, customer, team member assigned, status, and so on. As companies scale, they develop the need for defined roles and access permissions, so that finer-grained controls over data can be managed.
• Reports and Analytics — Various reports that collate case information in useful ways, to help understand productivity and problems, based on gathering underlying analytics.
• Mobility — What mobile solutions are offered?
• Automation — Are any aspects of customer interaction automated, such as routing based on roles, rules, and other information gleaned from the customer email or other customer-related information, like customer categorization?
• Integrations — In-context integrations with external tools, like CRM, help desk, work management, and document management solutions. The classic example is pulling up the customer’s information from a CRM solution in a widget when looking at an email. Another common integration is posting notifications from a shared inbox tool to defined channels in Slack.

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The spectrum of tools used in enterprises for workgroup collaboration, project management, task management, productivity, and communication has undergone sweeping change in recent years.

Well-established players have fallen from leadership market position (such as work media products Jive and Yammer), while new startups have burst on the scene becoming monster unicorns, most notably work chat’s market-defining product, Slack.

Ways of sharing work representations of social affordances introduced by pioneers a decade ago are now standard (like kanban boards and @mentions in comments). Meanwhile, internet giants such as Microsoft and Google are building on their strengths in productivity and email to expand their presence into the largest corporations.

There is no single, right answer to the perennial question, ‘what combination of tools is the best for business, today?’ Each company will have to evaluate the various component technologies in the work technology landscape and determine what offerings should be included in the company’s work technology stack. A 20,000 person law firm with offices in three countries has very different needs from a 300 person design firm in one city, and both are different from a 50 person software company with a large remote workforce.

Figure 1

Email continues to rule as the bedrock of business communication and impinges on work technology in many ways, but it is best to think of it as orthogonal to the tools we are examining and not as a competitor. We are not evaluating email in this series. In the same way, we are not looking into video conferencing or telephony.

As shown in figure 1, the work technology landscape naturally divides into three main categories, based on what the primary information being managed is: tasks, messages, or content, respectively. However, these categories overlap. For example, a content-centric solution may include tasks, and task-centric solutions may include messaging capabilities. This overlap is one of the reasons many are confused when considering what tools to use.

The red-lettered region on the table shows the areas we will be addressing in this series. Note that the bottom tier of these categories are personal or consumer-oriented apps, which may be used in a work setting but, in general, are positioned toward an individual or extra-organizational use. We will not be discussing social media tools like Twitter or the consumer Google Tasks app, for example.

We originally started this project thinking of a single report, but quickly decided that such a report would be so large that few would ever get around to reading it entirely. There will be three reports in the series.

Task-centric work technology, or Work Management

We are focusing on ‘collaborative’ work management, and deferring non-collaborative project management tools, such as those that principally involve modeling and analysis of projects. Note, however, that the leading tools in the work management category have adopted many conventions of project management such as Gantt charts, sophisticated reporting, and financial and resource analysis.

Vendors investigated include Monday, Trello, Wrike, Asana, Redbooth, Smartsheet, and many more.

Message-centric work technology

We are investigating two subcategories in this area:

1. Follow-centric solutions are based on principles derived from social media like blogging, Twitter, and Facebook. Examples are products like Yammer, IBM Connections, Podio, Salesforce Chatter, Facebook Workplace, and Jive.
2. Chat-centric solutions are based on the principles of chat systems like Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Reddit, and instant messaging. Examples are Slack, Fleep, Microsoft Teams, and HipChat.

For this series of reports, we will focus on work media and work chat tools, deferring a discussion of workforce communications tools, which are principally targeted at the hourly worker or out-of-the-office workforces like (for example) those in retail, manufacturing, construction, or hotel settings. GigaOm will dig into that rapidly expanding market in a separate report.

Content-centric work technology

This is the youngest of the three categories and builds on the widespread adoption of what is often called ‘new docs,’ such as Google Docs. It builds on the classic ‘productivity apps’ model of ‘word processing,’ spreadsheets/tables, and even presentation tool concepts. However, these ‘new docs’ generally exist solely in the cloud, not as a file on a personal computer like a Microsoft Word file.

We will examine a group of tools that have been reimagined around what I call ‘work processing’ with ideas derived from task-centric and message-centric tools, and which have become an alternative to other sorts of work technologies. Examples include Dropbox Paper, Coda, Quip, Notion and more.

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The spectrum of tools used in enterprises for workgroup collaboration, project management, task management, productivity, and communication has undergone sweeping change in recent years.

Well-established players have fallen from leadership market position (such as work media products Jive and Yammer), while new startups have burst on the scene becoming monster unicorns, most notably work chat’s market-defining product, Slack.

Ways of sharing work representations of social affordances introduced by pioneers a decade ago are now standard (like kanban boards and @mentions in comments). Meanwhile, the internet giants, like Microsoft and Google are building on their strengths in productivity and email to expand their presence into the largest corporations.

There is no single, right answer to the perennial question, ‘what combination of tools is the best for business, today?’ Each company will have to evaluate the various component technologies in the work technology landscape, and determine what offerings should be included in the company’s work technology stack. A 20,000 person law firm with offices in three countries has very different needs from a 300 person design firm in one city, and both are different from a 50 person software company with a largely remote workforce.

As shown in figure 1 below, message-centric work technology falls into two subcategories: Follow-centric and chat-centric work technologies. Many reviewers conflate these two subcategories, but I think it best to keep the distinctions between them.

Follow-centric tools were developed earlier than today’s chat-oriented tools (in general) and around a different model of communications, which I characterized for years as ‘work media’, because it was based on on principles derived from social media, like blogging, Twitter, and Facebook. In these tools the fundamental model of communications is based on ‘following’ other users, projects, topics, or the like, after which new posts are directed to the follower from the followed users, projects, topics, etc. In this report we will look at these work media tools: Yammer, IBM Connections, Podio, Salesforce Chatter, Facebook Workplace, and Jive.

Chat-oriented solutions (or ‘work chat’) are based on the principles of chat systems, like Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Reddit, and instant messaging. Let’s consider IRC a reference model as it is relatively simple, and it was the inspiration for the market-defining product in the space, Slack. IRC is based around the creation of named channels, either private or public, and users ‘enter’ the channels that act as chat rooms, and in which text messages are posted for all channel members to see. IRC also supports file sharing, and private messages between users. For this report we will look at Slack, Microsoft Teams, Fleep, Twist, and HipChat.

For these reasons, we will distinguish the two groups, but accept that they are substitutes for each other. I mean to say it is unlikely that a company would use both Slack and Workplace, even though they are different subcategories. They overlap in application, even when operating in distinct ways.

This is Volume 2 of our Work Technology Series. Check out the Introduction and Volume 1: Work Management.

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