New Feature Facilitates Secure Domain-Sharing for Enterprises Operating in Mixed Collaboration Environments
NextPlane, the industry leader in providing universal federation and interoperability services, announced intra-domain interoperability for its ConverseCloud service. This patented technology allows unified communications (UC) and/or team collaboration (TC) users to communicate and collaborate seamlessly across different platforms — even if the platforms share the same domain name.
“In either approach, IT is burdened with security risks and unnecessary management of guest accounts, or has to create new IM or email addresses based on the new domain names.”
This feature is critical given that the vast majority (79%) of enterprises have a mixed collaboration environment. The data comes from an upcoming NextPlane survey report on the state of collaboration and the challenges of multiple collaboration platforms in the enterprise. A mixed environment is one in which two or more enterprise messaging platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabber, or Slack are actively used in the company.
Each collaboration platform in an organization requires a domain (i.e contoso.com) in order to route messages and communications. Many organizations today are still operating legacy UC systems alongside newer TC platforms, but these platforms are not designed to talk to each other especially while sharing the same domain.
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In order for enterprise users to collaborate seamlessly between different platforms, the platforms need to be able to interoperate while sharing the same domain name. Disparate collaboration platforms aren’t able to exchange even basic chat and presence messages with other platforms because each platform will consider its domain’s traffic as local traffic, and won’t recognize messages from other platforms on the same domain. The NextPlane survey shows that IT professionals overwhelmingly agree that this is a problem: 77 percent stated domain-sharing was an essential feature.
NextPlane’s ConverseCloud intra-domain interoperability service solves this problem with patented technology that recognizes traffic from different platforms on the same domain and routes it accordingly. This enables users to search and add external contacts, share presence and status, exchange messages, participate in channels, send rich text and emojis, and share files with their colleagues on other collaboration platforms all while their platforms share the same domain.
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Exacerbating the mixed environment and domain issues is a fundamental shift in workplace behavior. Almost two-thirds (64%) of IT professionals report that collaboration platforms are now the de facto tool for communicating with colleagues inside or outside the enterprise, effectively replacing email. This in effect shifts communication and collaboration from an open system — email — to closed systems like TC and UC platforms.
“As IT faces the challenge of the new normal mixed collaboration environments they need better solutions to open up communication across the enterprise. Intra-domain interoperability has proven to be a less disruptive approach to internal communication than assigning different domain names to each messaging platform or using guest accounts,” Farzin Shahidi, NextPlane CEO, said. “In either approach, IT is burdened with security risks and unnecessary management of guest accounts, or has to create new IM or email addresses based on the new domain names.”
