Business Communication Platforms in BRIDGE Semesters TUOMAS VALTANEN To enable students, coaches and commissioners to work efficiently through a semester while collaborating remotely, suitable digital tools and platforms are necessary. Various digital solutions have been tested throughout the BRIDGE project, and the process has been finalized in its current form with the project heading towards its closure. A BRIDGE session starts with creating the student groups and ends with the gathering of all tangible results produced during the session, placing them into the BRIDGE project website. All these aspects together form the typical session workflow of BRIDGE, where the chosen business communication platform functions as the central workspace.
MODERN COLL ABOR ATION WITH DIG ITAL PL ATFORMS For the past few years, many of us have either studied or worked remotely with a modern collaboration tool, probably on Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom or some other alternative. While already useful without a global pandemic, it was likely the globally common social distancing requirements that boosted the modern business communication platforms into everyday use, even without considering cross-border distances. In the BRIDGE project, the coaches and students were already familiar with business communication platforms, simply because of the actual physical distance between multiple participants. Both positive and more challenging experiences have been recorded during the years of BRIDGE.
Business communication platforms are still a relatively new sets of technologies. It’s difficult to determine where they actually started, but according to some discussions, the current generation of platforms started to emerge around 2014 (Shah 2021). A typical business communication platform contains channel-based chat features, file sharing, project management tools and other productivity enhancing features. These features have already existed separately much before the platforms that actually combined everything into a single application. (Gera 2020.) A quick literature review reveals the rise of modern business communication platforms in recent years, Slack and Microsoft Teams being the most popular alternatives. 26
