Social-Collaboration Evaluations - Google, SAP, Slack, and Harmon.ie

We've just released the latest version of our Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software Evaluations Report with updated reviews of Google, Harmon.ie, SAP, and Slack. The last two are new entrants to the report. Here's a sneak peek of what's inside these evaluations.

Updated Reviews

Google: Google Apps for Work offers several handy collaboration tools and services but email remains the main selling proposition. As a company, Google appears more serious about the enterprise segment than ever before. You'll find several large consultancies and systems integrators signing up as implementation partners. With aggressive pricing tactics, Google is going all out to woo Microsoft customers. But the platform continues to have significant shortcomings.

Harmon.ie: Harmon.ie is a niche vendor of add-on tools for SharePoint / Office 365 tools. Most interestingly, it is one of the few collaboration solutions to treat email as a first-class object (usually that distinction is reserved for a file or a record) and lets you manage emails along with any associated documents inside SharePoint. The company also has an ambitious vision of solving the mobile-app proliferation problem.  It's one of several add-on "layer" vendors we evaluate.

New Vendor Evaluations

SAP: For a while there, ERP behemoth SAP was getting shellacked by the whole cloud model. SAP's rearguard actions included the purchase of SuccessFactors, and social-collaboration software JAM came to SAP as part of that deal. After a bit of retooling, JAM has become a stand-alone collaboration solution, though for the most part it is intended to add social-networking style functionality to some SAP applications.  Devil's in the details on this one.

Slack: Silicon Valley startup Slack offers a group chat tool and thanks to some savvy PR, it has the media eating out of its hands -- so much so that it may even have been successful in creating FOMO (or Fear Of Missing Out) among some enterprise executives. In our characteristic no-nonsense style we cut through the hype and tell you what exactly you're missing or not missing.

Next Steps

This updated report is available for immediate download to RSG subscribers. If you're not yet a subscriber, you can download a sample evaluation.

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