5 Examples That Show How Different Organizations Can Leverage the Same Collaborative Platform
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- Smart4 Engineering, 3,200 employees and 10 brands across 8 countries, uses it to connect areas of expertise that never used to meet.
- Amicio, over 500 employees across 4 sites, deployed it in days during the March 2020 lockdown and made it the backbone of its hybrid working.
- The Departmental Council of Essonne runs a network of more than 100 communication relays on it, where email used to be the staff’s main collaborative tool.
- École Boulle replaced three to four videoconferencing tools, most of them subject to the Cloud Act, with a single platform used by 650 people.
- The French Army’s Recruiting Department brings its 1,000 staff and its external providers together on it, without going through email.
- The common thread: the type of organization matters less than the problem being solved, silos, inherited tools or dependence on email.
The collaborative platform is every company’s real Swiss Army knife. More than just a means to collaborate, it facilitates information sharing, instant communication, and project management. It also reduces reliance on internal email and even boosts team productivity! Collaborative platforms tout a thousand and one possible uses. To help you grasp just how transformative they can be for businesses, we’re showing you five examples of organizations that have put the same collaborative platform in place.
All five organizations chose Talkspirit to streamline their teams’ collaborative work. In this article, we explain why they chose Talkspirit, and how they use our collaborative platform day after day.
This article stays on real deployments. If what you need is the definition and the stakes, the article that lays them out is more direct; if you are at the stage of comparing vendors, our comparison of the best collaboration platforms is built for that.
Case #1: Smart4 Engineering
Smart4 Engineering is an international engineering outfit. It has 3,200 employees and offers 10 brands throughout eight different countries. Each brand has a unique DNA and serves a different area of expertise. The challenge, then, was to “get experts with complementary know-how to work together,” but with different practices and tools.
To tackle this challenge, Smart4 Engineering wanted to implement an all-in-one collaborative platform that offers good functional coverage, but not already used by certain brands. Talkspirit met these needs perfectly, which is why the company opted for this tool.
The company set up a community of ambassadors to help choose the right tool, test it, and then promote it to the rest of the workforce. “Our CEO was our best ambassador, as he is 100% convinced of Talkspirit’s added value,” explains Mélanie Cohen-Crété, VP for Transformation.
Today, Smart4 Engineering makes extensive use of Talkspirit. In particular, it’s used to:
- lead communities of expertise known as Smart Leagues
- share important information (via each team’s home portal and news feed)
- facilitate videoconference meetings
- instant chat
- store, share and co-edit working documents
- centralize static data (thanks to the library)
This example clearly shows that a collaborative platform isn’t just for collaborating!
Case #2: Amicio
Amicio is a French company specializing in outsourcing and customer relations consulting. It employs over 500 people across four sites. The company was established with the merger of Relaytion and MeilleurContact in 2019. However, back then, “each team was operating with tools inherited from their past practices”. The challenge was therefore to set up a common collaborative platform to centralize exchanges and facilitate collaborative working. And that’s when the company discovered Talkspirit!
Also read: [Expert Opinion] Amicio’s Best Practices for Agile and Effective collaboration
The project was accelerated by the March 2020 lockdown, which truly forced Amicio to deploy Talkspirit in record time. “In the span of just a few days, Talkspirit replaced just about all the other tools we’d been using!“
Since then, hybrid working has remained firmly entrenched at Amicio. Employees can telework up to four days a week. Talkspirit has thus become an indispensable tool for remote collaboration, enabling employees to:
- monitor each team’s progress toward their sprints
- share meeting minutes
- communicate synchronously (via publications) and asynchronously (via chat and videoconferencing) with internal and external stakeholders
- maintain the cohesion of hybrid teams
- encourage mutual support and team spirit, values which are an integral part of the company’s internal LARGE model (League of Former Rugbymen of France’s Grandes Écoles, which are specialized institutions of higher education that operate outside the country’s university system).
Case #3: The Departmental Council of Essonne
Of course, collaborative tools aren’t just for business use. Local governments and agencies can likewise benefit from them. The Departmental Council of Essonne, for example, has set up a collaborative platform to animate a network of communication relays and improve the productivity of its communication staff.
“Before we brought in Talkspirit, our Communications department was more compartmentalized. We found it hard to obtain information from the department’s various services, but also to feed information back into the department itself,” recalls Julien Bordas, Digital Communications Manager. And with good reason: email was our staff’s main collaborative tool!
To streamline the department’s exchanges, the Communications department chose to deploy Talkspirit. Two factors influenced this choice: ease of use and data hosting in France.
Now used by the entire Communications team and more than 100 members of the network of communications relays, users particularly appreciate this tool for:
- its Projects module, which lets users organize communication campaigns, and plan and monitor production of content (both for the website and for social networks)
- workgroups, used to share internal information, propose content ideas, and highlight news and events.
Case #4: École Boulle
How about some examples of collaborative platform for school environments? Enter École Boulle, a public educational establishment specializing in art and design. To streamline work for its students and teachers, the school decided to adopt an all-in-one collaborative tool: Talkspirit.
Frédéric Poussin, the teacher in charge of École Boulle’s digital department, summed up the old model well: “Before Talkspirit, we were using three to four different tools just for videoconferencing!“ Most of these tools were American, and this of course raises data confidentiality flags (as they were subject to the U.S. government’s Cloud Act*).
For the school, implementing Talkspirit was a way of homogenizing access to the same information between different areas. However, it also nipped unstable, insecure collaborative suites in the bud. “We came to realize that as long as it’s free, you’re the one who’s the product!”
Used by 650 users, the platform facilitates:
- online homework submission (via the drive)
- multi-user co-editing of working documents (via the OfficeNow suite)
- sharing of information and teaching resources between students in the same class or in different sections (via each team’s news feed)
- exchanges between teachers and students
- exchanges related to the recruitment of candidates
- scheduling for videoconference meetings
Case #5: The French Army
For one of our last examples, we wanted to highlight how the French Army’s Recruiting Department uses a collaborative platform to manage marketing. This service, which employs around 1,000 people, works with numerous service providers to carry out its recruitment campaigns (for example, communications and public relations agencies). However, managing projects with a multitude of service providers can quickly become complex without the appropriate tools.
“Before Talkspirit, emails were our only means of communicating with all our service providers,” reports Lt. Col. Arnaud Mouasso Milla, deputy head of the French Army’s marketing operations coordination office. As a result, information had to be prioritized, and the information overload consumed too much of our time.
“Both a workspace and a discussion forum, Talkspirit also appealed to us because of its ability to bring both internal employees and external service providers together on the same platform. At the same time, we still retain control of our exchange and classification system. What’s more, this tool coordinates perfectly with our internal organization.” With Talkspirit, everyone has the same level of information and can easily access the history of exchanges. What’s more, since this tool is European, it guarantees the security of shared data.
“We’ve created several workgroups to facilitate exchange on all the marketing department’s various projects. The drive, chat, Project mode, and library are all features our staff and contractors link up on. Thanks to these features, they can exchange live and share working documents without having to use email. What’s more, they can video-conference on all media. As a result, collaboration is more fluid than ever, and our human interaction is more harmonious and secure!”
| Organization | Profile | What triggered the project | Main uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| OrganizationSmart4 Engineering | Profile3,200 employees, 10 brands, 8 countries | What triggered the projectGetting experts with complementary know-how to work together, despite different practices and tools | Main usesExpert communities, home portal and news feeds, videoconferencing, chat, co-editing, library |
| OrganizationAmicio | ProfileOver 500 employees across 4 sites | What triggered the projectThe 2019 merger of Relaytion and MeilleurContact, with each team still on its inherited tools | Main usesSprint tracking, meeting minutes, synchronous and asynchronous exchanges with internal and external stakeholders, hybrid team cohesion |
| OrganizationDepartmental Council of Essonne | ProfileThe Communications department and over 100 communication relays | What triggered the projectA compartmentalized department, with email as the main collaborative tool | Main usesProjects module for communication campaigns, workgroups for internal information and content ideas |
| OrganizationÉcole Boulle | Profile650 users, teachers and students | What triggered the projectThree to four different tools for videoconferencing alone, most of them subject to the Cloud Act | Main usesOnline homework submission, document co-editing, sharing of teaching resources, teacher and student exchanges, videoconferencing |
| OrganizationFrench Army Recruiting Department | ProfileAround 1,000 staff, plus numerous service providers | What triggered the projectEmail as the only channel with providers, and the information overload that came with it | Main usesWorkgroups per project, drive, chat, project mode, library, videoconferencing |
More organizations, more contexts
These five are not the only ones. Other organizations have described their own rollout:
- Stormshield built WeAreStormshield, the digital office of its 300 employees.
- Anah shows what the approach looks like inside a public body.
- The CNOEC uses it to speed up the digitalization of accountants.
- SIP to improve internal communication in the real estate sector.
- The Smart RH Club to run a user community that sits outside any single company.
And if the starting question is what a collaborative platform adds over a mailbox or an intranet, the article that compares the three answers it.
A final word
There you have it: examples of how virtually any operation can benefit from one and the same collaborative platform, be it a business, a local government, a school, and even the military. So, whether you need to streamline your own teams’ workflows, communicate with internal and external stakeholders, or take the headache out of document sharing, Talkspirit is the collaborative tool for you! Ready to find out how to leverage our platform? Click here to schedule a demo. 👇
*Cloud Act: a 2018 US federal law that allows the Department of Justice to order any US internet service provider to access data stored on its servers (even outside the US).
FAQ
They cover a business, a local government, a school, and even the military: Smart4 Engineering, Amicio, the Departmental Council of Essonne, École Boulle and the French Army's Recruiting Department.
With 3,200 employees and 10 brands across eight countries, each with its own practices and tools, the group wanted an all-in-one collaborative platform that offers good functional coverage but was not already used by certain brands. It set up a community of ambassadors to choose the tool, test it and promote it.
Amicio deployed the platform in record time during the March 2020 lockdown, and employees can telework up to four days a week. They use it to monitor each team's progress toward their sprints, share meeting minutes, and communicate with internal and external stakeholders.
Two factors influenced this choice: ease of use and data hosting in France. Before that, email was the Communications department's main collaborative tool. The platform is now used by the entire Communications team and more than 100 members of the network of communications relays.
Before Talkspirit, the school was using three to four different tools just for videoconferencing, most of them American and therefore subject to the U.S. Cloud Act. The platform now serves 650 users for online homework submission, co-editing, and exchanges between teachers and students.
The department, which employs around 1,000 people, works with numerous service providers, and emails were its only means of communicating with all of them, which created information overload. The platform brings internal employees and external providers together, with workgroups, drive, chat, Project mode and library.
