When your organization is considering what technology to invest money, time and other resources in taking a close look at several options is a very important element of the decision making process.
There are many options available when it comes to messaging including voice, video and teleconferencing and how that solution integrates into your other resources is a key factor in choosing your messaging platform.
One of the things many companies tend to do is consolidate into one ecosystem to benefit from the synergy of having various tools easily interact with each other. Microsoft is a company who has shown this as the way forward with tools like Office 365 and the software that can interact with it.
There is a new white paper over at the Microsoft Downloads Center that compares Microsoft's Skype for Business features against competitors like the very popular Slack, Jabber, WebEx, Spark and Google Hangouts.
In this document, the following features are compared across all of those products:
- Instant Messaging
- P2P Voice Calling
- Video Calling
- Meetings
- File Sharing via IM
- Full Office Integration
- Consistent Experience on PC, tablet and phones (Android, iOS and Windows)
- Choice of Hosting (Cloud/Hybrid/On-Premise)
- Centralized, enterprise-grade security, compliance, management and privacy controls
- Integrated Meeting Room Device Portfolio
The comparison, looking at features in each product as of May 2016, shows Skype matching all ten of those features, Slack hitting four, Jabber/WebEx/Spark matching seven and Google Hangouts getting two matches and two features that have caveats.
Research is critical and this document should be one of the items in your folder when decision times arrives alongside of white papers for the other products you are considering.
You can download the white paper from the Microsoft Download Center here.
But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.
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