Klaxoon claims new visual standard for collaboration with Board

Learning from customer feedback during the first Covid-19 lockdown period, Klaxoon has announced Board, which it claims will be a new visual standard for collaborative work, promoting participation in remote work scenarios.

The French company said that during the March lockdown, millions of companies and their staff had to get organised and adapt to new working practices overnight. Early that month, Klaxoon launched a programme providing free access to its technology, to help organisations face these new challenges.

Thousands of teams received free support, and the company said they had made three main observations: the urgent need to work differently and to find methods that allowed them to change quickly; the emergence of new management practices, with the need to synchronise more frequently and more quickly; and overly long videoconferences, where it was difficult for teams to switch from one screen to another, and it was often difficult to get access to a good network connection.

In response, Klaxoon created Board, which it describes as a simple, all-in-one, accessible tool that enables visual collaboration, for simple and inclusive teamwork with maximum participation. It offers a visual experience that is said to be as close as possible to an office workspace reality, allowing users to work normally wherever they are, “liberating the potential of the individual to help the collective”.

The Board visual workspace is accessible via smartphone, tablet or computer with features that allow teams to express their creativity. At its heart is Live by Klaxoon, a built-in videoconferencing function, for when teams needs to synchronise rapidly.

It also offers a library containing several hundred ready-to-use collaborative work templates, tables and patterns inspired by industry-standard agile methods and the best ideas from the Klaxoon community. These are aimed to help workers be better organised, to boost efficiency and save time.

Board allows transition between the written and spoken word, audio and video to promote real-time synchronisation, information sharing, and what Klaxoon calls the establishment of new “collaborative rituals”. These support expression between colleagues, the organisation of ideas, decision-making and getting down to action.

The system’s augmented videoconferencing experience presents all work tools on the same screen. Audio and video feeds are directly embedded on Board for more visual, shorter and simpler synchronisation meetings and one-tenth of the workspace is devoted to videoconferencing, leaving as much space as possible for the content that people are working on.

The conferencing facility supports up to 15 participants, a limit designed to ensure optimum participation and discussion, and conferences are delivered as renewable five-, 15- or 30-minute sessions.

This has a dual purpose: the company believes that a higher number means that attention levels drop, teams become distracted and synchronisation becomes inefficient; it is also designed to cap data consumption and makes it possible to use Board even if participants’ network coverage is weak. 

It is also possible to launch leading videoconferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom and Webex directly from Board.

“Board was designed based on various experiences of teams that had to work remotely during lockdown, in order to provide real solutions to our new hybrid work model,” said Klaxoon CEO and founder Matthieu Beucher. “Board provides an ideal workspace for meeting, sharing information and creating together, whatever your team’s situation.”