Belfast’s Whitespace launches collaboration platform

  • The Shift Collaboration Platform, a new multi-functional secure virtual collaboration workspace and targeted networking platform, is launching this week.

    Created by Belfast's award-winning technology and innovation company Whitespace, the Shift Collaboration Platform, which is available to organisations as a white labelled product, provides a market leading blend of professional collaboration and targeted networking through its online portal, enhancing both productivity and innovation. This is achieved through the platform’s ability to enable organisations to work securely, to share insights, to collaborate with colleagues and external partners, to initiate private and public discussions, and to host events in the Metaverse; taking Work From Home to Work From Metaverse.

    Originated from a platform developed for 1,200 C-suite executives and innovators internationally, the Shift Platform has been designed to cut out the excess and often distracting noise experienced by users of other collaboration tools, including LinkedIn. Instead, the easy to access platform provides structured conversations, a hub to expand relevant connections, and remote, public and private workspace environments that are supported by client portal productivity tools.

    The launch of the Shift Collaboration Platform follows extensive research by Whitespace, which shows that innovators and C-suite executives, across private and public sectors internationally, view collaboration as vital to the success of their work, rating its importance at a score of over 9 out of 10.

    The Platform delivers against this need by empowering high-level secure collaboration, inspiring innovation, learning, and the fast-tracking of initiatives, ideas and solutions in a new digital collaboration landscape.

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    Shift’s survey of over 100 collaborators, C-suite executives and innovators found that over half are frustrated with the need to use several different platforms for their current work. Over 70% stated that existing social channels were noisy and distracting, while 68% said that they had to spend more time than they’d like searching for relevant content.

    Shift bucks this trend by offering an integrated, seamless experience that has been built from the ground up with the sole purpose of collaboration in mind. This is unlike other platforms that have been constrained by legacy applications that are not designed to work together.

    Andrew Webber, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, at Whitespace explains: “Up and running for customers within as little as a week, the Shift Platform makes collaboration simple, working with other software platforms, and integrating with existing email accounts. The architecture behind the Shift Platform is cloud-agnostic, allowing organisations to deploy it on their cloud provider of choice. This flexibility was a key part in Shift’s development and reflects that fact that 62% of organisations polled stated that they want online collaboration that can be seamlessly integrated with their existing systems.Shift delivers to this requirement, taking the world of online collaboration and networking into a totally new realm.”

    Available as a white label SaaS solution, Shift differs from the likes of MS Teams, LinkedIn and Slack by enabling organisations to brand the Shift Platform as their own. This gives white label users a collaboration and networking tool that has the look and feel of their organisation, enhancing their ‘owned’ collaboration environment and ecosystem. Users choose from a suite of services and features that allows them to tailor the platform to their precise needs. This gives organisations the tools they need to achieve and fast-track their objectives, opening up a new world of secure collaboration possibilities with stakeholders.

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    Uniquely, the Shift Platform allows organisations to build a single collaborative network that can function externally and internally via its public and private workspace environments. 

    The first platform of its kind to be metaverse enabled, Shift allows users to meet, interact, attend events or view broadcasts in a range of metaverse environments including lecture halls, meeting rooms, art galleries and even store fronts.

    This metaverse feature helps organisations to address their decarbonising agendas, removing the need for travel through the delivery of in-person online events with Avatar options and Virtual Reality spaces, enabling organisations to engage with colleagues, clients, customers and collaborators in environments that are customisable, and compatible with Oculus 2 Headsets.

    Andrew Webber, from Whitespace, added, “The expansion of remote and hybrid working and online communications has made it vital for organisations to have the right platform to enable collaboration online between their staff, and with clients, customers, suppliers and collaborators. Organisations using the Shift Platform will be able to invite anyone to join them in a single secure online environment. Users can easily switch discussions from public to private enabling both open community discussion and group collaboration when desired, and private conversations when needed. This is the kind of flexibility that organisations have been crying out for and which our Shift Collaboration Platform takes to a whole new level.”

    The Shift Platform is Secure by Design and will be listed as a supplier on the G-Cloud 13 framework.

    Further details can be found here.

    Source: Written from press release

    About the author

    Aoife is a Sync NI writer with a previous background working in print, online and broadcast media. She has a keen interest in all things tech related. To connect with Aoife feel free to send her an email or connect on LinkedIn.

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