About filesharing and collaboration

With Google Drive a further contender is entering the market for cloud-based storage. The appeal of carefree data custody and ubiquitous, multi-device access attracts consumers, not just for their private needs, but increasingly in their business roles. Services like Dropbox have lowered the "save-to-cloud" barrier dramatically. 

In fact, many users start to save their documents per default into the cloud, which makes a sole "save-to-internal-harddrive" more of an exception. With cloud-storage comes sharing. And with the enabling of sharing, users cross the border and enter the realm of collaboration.

Now of course, sharing does not mean collaborating. Sharing is first of all nothing else but joint access to a file. As such, it is an essential prerequisite of collaboration. Collaboration starts, where parties not just share file access, but share goals. A goal is a desired purpose, a personally or organizationally anticipated result. All kinds of human behavior are triggered to achieve a goal.

Collaboration circumscribes a complex batch of behavior patterns. Learning, understanding, but specifically changing human business behavior, e.g. towards more or better collaboration, is a challenging undertaking.

As illustrated with the case of "shared file access", IT offers infrastructure or tools to support and alleviate an intended behavior: as the barriers for file access relax, the chances for cooperative behavior elevate. Same is true for a service like Refinder.

Which business behaviors are underpinned by Refinder?

  • For one, Refinder is a communications platform. Users can inform, discuss, comment their business matters in discrete groups. They can make autonomous choices, to include others into their activity streams, fostering participation and involvement of co-workers.
  • Refinder is an infrastructure for content organization. Searching, sorting, filtering and linking restores content and communications along with its contextual meaning.
  • Refinder provides focus. It makes plenty of means available to aggregate disparate information sources in one central spot for the sake of the "complete picture" and the informed decision.

Refinder caters for a wide range of collaboration preconditions. In regards of sharing, Refinder takes it a couple of steps further towards collaboration. Cloud-based storage and file-sharing providers stop at the level of joint file access, whereas Refinder enriches this access with instruments for joint sense-making in order to achieve business goals.