TeamLab user success story #3: Collaboration feeling really matters!

There’s a common belief that free and open-source software is not for enterprises. In one of our recent posts we tried to disprove this misconception. And today, as part of our user success stories, we are talking to the Company which is active throughout the world as a leading player in the field of compression, automation and drive technologies. In 2009 its 6,500 employees achieved sales of 772 million euro. Despite being a large enterprise this company uses our free solution to improve communications. From the interview you can get an idea why they make their choice for TeamLab.

So, meet Otmar Spoettel, the representative of the Company IT department, an internal profit center with 100 employees at 8 locations in Europe/ Asia/ America.

Q: Otmar, considering the Company size it’s very likely that you already use collaboration tools. What shortcomings you are trying to eliminate with TeamLab?
Yes, we have online tools in our company Intranet. The problem with the company intranet is that only a small group of employees it use. The design is too “clean” and you have not the possibility to create private “rooms” for teams. All information is readable for all employees. The user has the feeling to be to public. To improve the internal communication between the split teams in the IT department we choose TeamLab as a tool to help us.

Q: What made you choose TeamLab from other collaboration platforms?
First of all the design and the “collaboration feeling”. It’s a merge between Project management and Team collaboration. And has tools like Polls, Blog, Forum and Wiki.

Q: What TeamLab features do you find the most useful for your team?
The Community part is very useful. And is one of the parts which is often use from our younger employees. With the Project part we have some problems due to the access rights are too simple.

Q: You mentioned that intranet was used by a small group of employees. Are there any changes since you started using TeamLab?
We have some users which use it daily, users which use some times in the week and users which use never.

Q: Why, do you think, some of your employees don’t use TeamLab at all?
The problem is that the most employees are never worked with collaboration tools. They worked face to face or via telephone. The younger employees start to use Teamlab as a platform to exchange ideas and start to document in the wiki. The older employees use the Teamlab only to find information, but don’t start to discuss or ask question and so on.
I think Web 2.0 has a generation problem. You cannot easily change the work habits of people. You need to find a case to bring the user to the web (whatever the name of the tool is).
On the other hand the younger generation is familiar with such tools from the private side like Facebook, ICQ, and other social network tools.

Thank you so much, Otmar, for participating in our interview and wish you further success in business!