The Single Pane of Glass Workplace

What's the future of the modern workplace? This article is in response to a LinkedIn post thread discussing the best meeting software. I think that is the wrong question. When I look around the open office, I see workers with three monitors attached to their laptops. One running Excel, one their CRM, and a third showing some PowerPoint presentation. It almost reminiscent of the old DOS computing days; jumping from one application to another. Back in the late 90’s Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie had a vision of the Single Pane of Glass computing model. Recalling a line from one of the Sopranos episodes with a New Jersey accent, “It’s so simple.”

Instead of jumping between applications, all your work is accomplished on one large screen, using one solution. Slack was the first SPG offering and its a good product. But Microsoft Teams has extended the modern workplace paradigm. Teams is in the process of becoming the one application where all your work takes place. It is your messaging center, your meetings & collaboration environment, all your telephony activities are done in Teams, file management, work-groups, and chat. Hundreds of 3rd party solutions can be accessed directly within Teams. The Alt-Tab keystroke combo will become a thing of the past.

Soon Teams will become your mail client replacement as well. In fact, I predict that Teams will become the primary Office 365 application with every Office capability accessed and utilized from within Teams. Is it perfect – No. There are still some rough edges and missing components, but the Teams is only two years old.

Statistics are already available showing the significant workplace productivity increases using a Single Pane of Glass environment. It's only going to get better. Why should I have to use email from one provider, web meetings from another, and telephony from a third. I should be able to use one SPG environment to accomplish everything I do during my workday. The old way of doing things - what a waste of time and money.

The future of the modern workplace is the Single Pane of Glass paradigm and right now Microsoft Teams is the leader in terms of features, functionality, and capabilities. And, it’s free with Office 365. Microsoft just announced that over 500,000 organizations are using Teams. Microsoft is spending millions perfecting Teams, streamlining its operations, improving the worker experience, and adding more capabilities.