Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Your marketing team shares a company update internally. The message is ready, the link works, and employees are encouraged to post it. Then very little happens. It is easy to assume people are uninterested. But perhaps the request arrived during a busy workday, without explaining why the news matters or what employees could add to it. Some may be unsure what they are allowed to say. Others may like their employer but prefer to keep company promotion off their personal profiles.

Your next patient is waiting. A colleague needs an answer before their shift ends. Somewhere in Slack, there’s a conversation you need to catch up on. First, you have to figure out which channel it’s in, whether someone replied in a thread, and which notification on your screen actually matters. On a quieter day, that might be a minor annoyance. In healthcare, you can’t always count on a quieter day.

Every team communicates more than it realises. There are weekly updates, process changes, onboarding guides, event invitations, policy reminders and project announcements. Most of these messages are written quickly and shared in chat channels or email, and many of them are skimmed rather than read. A well-chosen visual can change that. A clear diagram explains a new process faster than three paragraphs, and a friendly header makes a weekly update feel worth opening.

To your customers, your frontline workers are your brand: the shop assistant who finds the right size, the warehouse lead who ships the order, the home nurse who checks in. They make up about 80% of the global workforce, yet they’ve been left out of the last decade of workplace transformation. While corporate teams have agents, instant customer data and connected systems, the frontline often runs on paper checklists and group texts, without even a corporate email address.

Six of the vendors behind openDesk, including Element, have formed Open Productivity: a joint venture that brings the sovereign digital workplace to businesses and critical infrastructure operators. openDesk was created for German public administration. It brings together established open source applications for documents, email, calendars, file sharing, knowledge management and secure real-time communications into a single sovereign workplace suite.

Digital training requires consistent course delivery, measurable progress, and effective communication among employees, trainers, and managers. SCORM 1.2 provides a standard format that allows compatible online courses to communicate with a learning management system (LMS). This connection helps organizations assign courses, record learner activity, and review completion results through a structured process.

Online retail, store replenishment, subscriptions, and wholesale orders all move through a warehouse differently. Treat them the same and you get delays, extra handling, and inventory that nobody quite trusts. That is why more businesses are moving away from one-size-fits-all fulfillment and building processes around their own products, channels, and customers.

Workplace communication has changed significantly as businesses have adopted remote work, hybrid teams, and digital collaboration tools. Employees now rely on messaging platforms to exchange information, discuss projects, ask questions, and coordinate daily responsibilities. While fast communication can improve productivity, businesses also need to consider how workplace conversations and shared information are protected.

We’re delighted to share that openDesk now deploys Element Server Suite (ESS) directly from Element. The Element frontend still reflects the openDesk product and branding, but now openDesk deploys Element Server Suite (ESS) directly from Element, the original manufacturer and product owner of the software. It brings hardened Kubernetes deployments, next-generation OIDC-based authentication and the complete ESS feature set to Germany’s sovereign office productivity suite.