Workplace & Collaboration

Workplace software runs the same machinery as consumer chat and content, with the duties turned around. A team's Slack channel, a Zoom call, a Confluence page, a Jira issue, a Figma file and a law firm's matter folder all sit in a tenant the customer organization controls: its admins provision people from the directory and cut them off through SSO, decide who outside the company can see what, set retention, place legal holds, answer the subpoena, approve the apps and the AI, and can leave with their data. The vendor runs the service and follows the customer's instructions. Around that inversion sit the parts every vendor has to build: organizations and workspaces, managed accounts and SCIM, guests and shared channels, permissions and link sharing, seats priced by tier and counted by rules that differ by vendor, real-time messaging, meetings and co-editing, work items and workflows, enterprise search and assistants over company data, and the audit, eDiscovery, DLP and archiving that regulators and courts expect, under GDPR, works council rules, SEC and FINRA recordkeeping, the Commission's Teams decision and the ABA's rules for lawyers. This book surveys how the industry does each piece, benchmarked across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zoho, Atlassian, Slack, Zoom, Webex, Notion, Figma, Miro, Asana, monday.com, Linear, Dropbox, Box, DocuSign, ServiceNow, Glean, Okta, Mattermost, Matrix, Clio and iManage, with no single company as the model, and how you'd build it, extending one core data model chapter by chapter.

It reads in eleven parts, plus a reference. The Business: the parties, the inverted duties, how the money works, the core data model, the landscape, business models and unit economics, plans, pricing and seats, and suites, bundling and antitrust. Tenancy and Identity: tenants and workspaces, SSO and managed accounts, provisioning and SCIM, guests and cross-org collaboration, permissions and sharing, admin consoles and policies, and data residency. Chat and Messaging: channels and threads, chat at scale, notifications and presence, email and calendar, and frontline workers. Meetings and Voice: meetings and video, recordings, transcripts and AI notes, async video, business phone and contact center, and rooms and the hybrid office. Docs, Wikis and Files: docs and wikis, real-time co-editing, files and sync, intranets, no-code databases, and e-signatures. Work Management: work items and fields, workflows, queries and dashboards, boards and sprints, portfolios and goals, automation rules, service management, and development collaboration. Design and Visual Collaboration: design tools, whiteboards, and design systems and handoff. Search, Integrations and AI: enterprise search, apps and marketplaces, APIs and rate limits, integration platforms, AI assistants over company data, and agents and MCP. Security and Compliance: audit logs, retention and legal hold, eDiscovery, DLP, customer-managed keys, certifications, regulated communications, employee monitoring, and threats and incidents. Law Firms and Professional Services: the matter-centric firm, intake and conflicts, trust accounting, time and e-billing, and legal documents and AI. Running the Platform: architecture, clients, reliability, billing and resellers, selling to enterprises, migrations and switching, accessibility, and metrics. Reference: a glossary of every term, grouped by part.