At Teamwork, we know that the way businesses work is evolving. Gone are the days of hoarding knowledge to get ahead; instead, we’re working in an era of unparalleled collaboration and — dare we say it — teamwork. But collaboration is impossible without clear, structured, and adaptable information infrastructures. Information can’t just live in one person’s head: it needs to be transparent, accessible, and central. For everyone. This is fundamental, regardless of team or industry, but it’s especially true when so many teams rely on remote talent scattered around the world. When you’re working together across continents and time zones, every team member needs to be in sync and on the same page. Having one single source of truth for your work is something that’s been baked into Teamwork products since day one. But as our company grew, we were seeing first-hand the need for a dedicated content collaboration platform. And we were also seeing first-hand that the market leaders were not delivering. We tried every product in the space. There were some that looked promising and pretty, only to be exposed as wildly lacking in functionality as soon as we scratched the surface. There were others that offered some of the functionality we wanted — like real-time collaborative editing — but weren’t quite fit for purpose (i.e. it left us with unanchored documents floating around without context, with no ability to make a “book” of content and no reading mode). We don’t think that’s how important documents should be treated. And when you’re trying to encourage everyone, company-wide, to read and interact with those important documents, you can’t afford to make the experience difficult and unwieldy. We thought we could do better. So we did.

We knew what we wanted: a place where important content could be stored, accessed, edited, read, and shared, all with a beautiful, intuitive UI. Here are the features we built in order to make that a reality:

Content collaboration software is the kind of tool that we could envision being used by any and every type of organization. It had to be easy to use, whether you were just learning about the benefits of this type of product for the first time or switching from an alternative. Such widespread possibilities meant that we could see use cases for every type of team member, from C-Levels to Support staff: from internal company manuals to HR policies and processes, from SOPs to help docs. And with so many people potentially using the product — all with different roles, technical abilities, and requirements — it needed to be easy to search, easy to structure, and easy to consume.

The eureka moment for us was our Required Reading feature. We knew from experience how hard it was to get people to read the things we needed them to read — essential updates, company news, important policies — and it was even more impossible to track who was actually up to date. (I’m convinced the numbers were so low because of the bloated, overwhelming user experience most platforms offered.) So we came up with Required Reading, a way for you to ensure that everything that needs to be read, gets read. By marking an individual page or an entire space as Required Reading, all staff are given a list of the pages they need to read right on their Dashboard. If a page marked as Required Reading is updated, they’ll be shown the changes next time they log in, with the changes subtly highlighted. And now, any time a new team member joins the company, they’ll know exactly what they need to read — and you’ll be able to ensure that they’ve actually read it. Not only is this great for onboarding and bringing new employees up to speed, but we think it’ll be a game changer for the way important company information gets disseminated across the board.

See everyone’s edits in real time. We built Teamwork Spaces to have a powerful collaborative editing capability, so you can see per-character changes as they’re being made. It’s great for helping your team to stay up to date and avoid duplicating work (for example, if you’re all writing meeting notes). And with markdown support, as well as the ability to embed media like images and videos, you can make your important documents not only easy to read, but actually enjoyable to read.

Anything we build has to work together. That’s why we designed Teamwork Spaces to work in harmony with other Teamwork products, so you can create tasks within a space that get linked back to the right project. Documentation doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so by integrating with your project management software, you can ensure that everyone has the full context by syncing with discussions, notes, and comments. This leads to some pretty cool possibilities. For example, you can embed a task list from a project in Teamwork Projects directly into a space, so you can work on your tasks from your space without having to switch apps. You can even mark your tasks as complete from within Teamwork Spaces, saving you time, streamlining your workflow, and helping you to be more efficient. We’re firm believers in that age-old tech adage of “eating your own dog food”. But when it comes down to it, so what if we use a product every day — what does it mean for other companies? Or, to put it even more bluntly: why does Teamwork Spaces matter? We’ve already talked about all the myriad ways we anticipate people using Teamwork Spaces to power a more transparent, collaborative, productive workplace. But it’s more than that. By treating important documentation the way it deserves to be treated, and storing it at the center of your business where everyone can access it, you can foster the kind of workplace where everyone has the tools they need to thrive and work together, beautifully. Want to see for yourself? Take a tour of Teamwork Spaces, or start your 30 day free trial below. Already a Teamwork customer? Enable your free trial of Teamwork Spaces directly from your Teamwork Projects or Teamwork Desk account.