Leveraging Visual Collaboration Tools for Enterprise Teams: Benefits, Use Cases, and Best Practices

An Idea Is Born

Creately started as a visual collaboration platform back in 2008. In this exclusive interview with visual collaboration software expert Chandika Jayasundara, we explore the benefits of leveraging visual collaboration tools for enterprise teams. At the time, Chandika and his cofounder were involved in a research program at the University of Melbourne and realized there was no natural collaborative way to draw things on the internet. They also realized that when working on complex projects, the result is often a visual design like a diagram or schematic that visually captures a lot of information. However, this visual information is usually reduced to a flat JPEG image in a PowerPoint or Word document, losing all the rich data in the original blocks and shapes.

Visual Collaboration Tools
Leveraging Visual Collaboration Tools for Enterprise Teams: Benefits, Use Cases, and Best Practices 2

Creately aimed to combine visual collaboration with embedding data and knowledge into the diagrams so they become more than just pictures. As Chandika says, “We had an idea to combine two things – visual problem exploration and documentation – into a co-form that looks like a diagram but has many layers of embedded data and knowledge. Our main goal was to create a way for people to develop diagrams that incorporate all the necessary information around them.”

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Start Visualizing Ideas with a Free Creately Trial Today

Experience the power of Creately's visual collaboration platform for yourself with a 14-day free trial. Easily create diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes, and more to brainstorm ideas, design projects, and align teams without any limitations. Sign up now to access Creately's full suite of intuitive tools for mapping out systems, workflows, and creative concepts. Take advantage of real-time collaboration, templates, and integrations with popular apps.

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Visual Collaboration Tools

Adding collaboration capabilities to documents, slides, spreadsheets, or canvases is an apparent evolution, according to Chandika: “And I think that's not anything magical for somebody to think about. Should we add collaboration to this form of content? be the document, slides, a spreadsheet, or a canvas because it's fairly obvious for anybody.” Creately was an early SaaS company in visual collaboration, initially focused on collaboration and diagramming.

Chandika explains, “So overall, post-COVID and how teams work across the world distributed, collaboration, I think, is a continuing mainstream trend that everyone adopts and has to use daily. It's only a growing market, the visual collaboration space. That space has to grow, continues to grow, and more and more people realize the benefits of having a virtual tool to work around this, work around core problems that they have on a day-to-day basis, and put information in a central place.”

We believe that The power of visual collaboration is its ability to break down barriers and bring people together. When teams can visually map out ideas, processes, and goals, it unlocks creativity, alignment, and productivity. Lucid has a similar thought.

Visualizing Decisions with Creately

This tutorial demonstrates creating a decision tree using Creately's online diagramming tool. The video walks through adding nodes, branches, and notes to evaluate options and outcomes.

Benefits Of Visual Collaboration Tools

Visual collaboration tools like Creately benefit distributed teams to brainstorm, define processes, and run projects visually in a central place. As Chandika says, “I think one of the most exciting things about AI is the capability to draw insight from large data sets that just may not be possible, you know, through traditional methods. So fascinating times that we're living through and seeing different capabilities.”

Streamline Company Structure with Creately's Org Chart Tool

This tutorial demonstrates how to easily create an organizational chart to visualize company structure using Creately's intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Use Cases in Enterprises

Creately has seen the product used across many departments and for various use cases within large enterprises. As Chandika Jayasundara explained:

“We have thousands of custom design templates that people can use on Creately. We see organizations able to use the product across all departments in all kinds of different use cases.”

Some examples of use cases mentioned:

  • Brainstorming and ideation
  • Mapping out processes
  • Project management
  • Marketing campaign planning
  • Designing workflows
  • Visualizing data and processes from tools like Jira, GitHub, etc.

The platform's flexibility allows teams to structure information and collaborate visually in the way that suits their needs while still maintaining connections to key data sources.

Start Visualizing Ideas with a Free Creately Trial Today

Experience the power of Creately's visual collaboration platform for yourself with a 14-day free trial. Easily create diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes, and more to brainstorm ideas, design projects, and align teams without any limitations. Sign up now to access Creately's full suite of intuitive tools for mapping out systems, workflows, and creative concepts. Take advantage of real-time collaboration, templates, and integrations with popular apps.

No Credit Card Required

Best Practices for Implementation

When implementing a visual collaboration platform like Creately within large enterprises, Chandika emphasized several best practices:

Ease of adoption

The platform must be intuitive and easy for employees across the organization to use quickly. Creately focuses on having an interface that is simple and familiar. As Chandika Jayasundara, co-founder of Creately, explains:

“In the initial days, it was more about educating the customer that, okay, this platform is robust, reliable, and being able to go into market, finding the right kind of channels, because it was in the early days of SaaS.”

Having an intuitive user interface has been a priority since the beginning. This has helped drive adoption across organizations.

Security

Enterprises require compliance with security standards and protocols. Creately has invested significantly in security and compliance capabilities. As Chandika highlights:

“Just earlier this year we achieved our SOC 2, Type 2 certification and ISO 27001 certification. So we are fully compliant.”

With certifications like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, Creately meets critical security requirements for enterprise customers.

Integration

Connecting to existing tools like Microsoft Teams, Jira, and HR systems is critical so visuals stay in sync with the latest data. Creately offers robust integrations and custom development capabilities. As Chandika explains:

“We have a very deep integration with Microsoft Teams. Zoom and Slack, we have a standard integration. And we have data integrations open on creately, and we are able to build out integrations if a specific customer requires something very specific from a third-party platform.”

Integrations help connect Creately visuals to important data sources and keep information up-to-date.

Seamless Visual Collaboration within Microsoft Teams

Integrate Creately directly into Teams channels to enable real-time diagramming, whiteboarding, and visual brainstorming without switching between apps.

Governance

Companies need to be able to manage permissions, sharing, and data access. Creately provides strong controls around governance. As Chandika states:

“And we have quite advanced management controls built in so that you can manage the data that you have, manage how people share and how people access.”

With robust access controls, companies can manage sharing and permissions within Creately.

Adding structure

To get the most from visual collaboration, teams must leverage frameworks like SWOT, business model canvas, Kanban boards, etc. Creately aims to promote visual literacy through templates and frameworks. As Chandika explains:

“Having a tool, okay, so we give it to somebody who does not understand visual frameworks, how to apply these things. They will still just draw a basic flow chart or a bunch of stickies on a, they'll replicate what they'll do on a whiteboard because that's the visual structure that they know.”

By providing templates for SWOT, Kanban, and other frameworks, Creately helps teams get more value from visual collaboration.

Co-piloting with AI

AI capabilities like generative features and intelligent recommendations can help guide and enhance visual work. Creately is developing AI capabilities as a “co-pilot” for visual work. As Chandika states:

“Bringing AI and using it as a co-pilot or a assistive capability to maybe like another member in your team as you work through various problems on a visual canvas, is going to be very interesting and it's going to be quite mainstream, very, very fast.”

AI promises to provide new insights and angles that enhance visual collaboration.

The main goal emphasized is making visual collaboration central to knowledge work in a way that feels intuitive and structured. Following these best practices helps ensure a successful implementation.

Visualize Ideas with Creately Concept Maps

Learn how to use Creately's online concept mapping tool to organize and connect ideas and information for better understanding.

Creately's Enterprise Capabilities

Creately offers robust security and access controls critical for enterprise use. Chandika explains, “So thing number one regarding enterprises is information security and management. And you know, we achieved our SOC 2, Type 2 certification, and ISO 27001 certification just earlier this year.”

He says, “And we have quite advanced management controls built in so that you can manage the data that you have, manage how people share, how people access. So, these control aspects are covered for an application that is very easy to adopt and use inside an organization. I think those are the two main things, right? And can this app or product be adopted easily enough across the organization?”

Creately also integrates with standard enterprise tools like SCIM and Azure AD for streamlined access control and provisioning. As Chandika summarizes, “Number two is, is it secure? And does it tick all the boxes that we want into it? So it's integrated with your SCIM or Azure AD and so on and so forth. So it's streamlined for enterprise use.”

Structuring Information Visually

Visual formats like diagrams and charts can enhance understanding and communication by mapping out organizational processes and workflows in detail. As Chandika Jayasundara, co-founder of Creately, notes, “Diagrams capture complex workflows visually.” Linking related documents and data visually creates a central knowledge repository and hub for collaboration.

Streamline teamwork in the digital workplace

With the rise of remote and hybrid work, visual collaboration platforms have become essential for productive teamwork. As Jayasundara recalls, “Collaboration was natural from day one” for Creately, which began as a real-time visual collaboration platform. Built-in chat and real-time co-editing facilitate seamless collaboration across organizations.

Creately offers robust features like unlimited canvases, permissions controls, and integrations to meet complex enterprise requirements. Integrations with tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Jira centralize information and unify workflows. Users build visual workflows while linking them to data, boosting productivity by streamlining processes.

Start Visualizing Ideas with a Free Creately Trial Today

Experience the power of Creately's visual collaboration platform for yourself with a 14-day free trial. Easily create diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes, and more to brainstorm ideas, design projects, and align teams without any limitations. Sign up now to access Creately's full suite of intuitive tools for mapping out systems, workflows, and creative concepts. Take advantage of real-time collaboration, templates, and integrations with popular apps.

No Credit Card Required

Conclusion

Visual collaboration platforms like Creately allow enterprises to leverage visuals for better productivity, security, and seamless teamwork across distributed teams and tools. Visual formats enhance understanding, while robust features tailored to enterprises facilitate adoption. Centralizing information visually creates a hub for productivity and collaboration.

Sign up for a free trial of Creately today with no credit card required.

Watch our episode featuring Creately: In this Software Spotlight podcast, Michael Bernzweig interviews Chandika Jayasundara, Co-Founder of visual collaboration platform Creately, on the company's growth from a 2008 research project to over 10 million users today. Chandika explains how the initial vision of diagrams with data layers evolved to a focus on enabling collaboration across tools like Microsoft Teams. With recent ISO and SOC 2 certifications, Creately continues to build trust and integration capabilities.

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