“Editors comment”: Dropbox’s attempt, with its latest iteration, to reinvent itself as provider of digital workspaces rather than just shared folders underlines the rapid development of
this new technology area and follows recent plays by tech giants Microsoft and Facebook, as well as a host
of smaller, emerging companies like Wrike – which we will be writing about in a future issue. The emergence of cloud workspaces is testament to the shortcomings of traditional ways of working and the appetite for easier, more intuitive collaboration that doesn’t involve long delays and the need to click in and out of applications. As IGEL’s Simon Townsend tells us in our feature on page 30, cloud workspaces are becoming an increasingly attractive option for organisations having to make

the switch from Windows 7. Instead of moving over
to Windows 10, many are looking at a virtual desktop infrastructure, with thin clients and other endpoints secured and managed using IGEL’s cloud-ready, hardware agnostic Linux-based operating system.

Just as digital workspaces are evolving, so, too, are physical ones – and for largely the same reasons, viz. greater flexibility, greater mobility, easier interactions, improved collaboration and cost-savings. The enduring appeal of
the fixed office as a place to work is in large part because
it facilitates planned and spontaneous face-to-face communication (though it can’t be too long before video calling integrated into digital workspaces does this just as well). This is one of the attractions of co-working spaces, too. For start-ups and small businesses, such spaces hold
the possibility that the person at the next desk or the next table in the on-site vegan café could become a customer or a key supplier. To increase the likelihood of this happening workspace providers have started to offer potential customers (or members) a curated ecosystem of fellow users. A good example is Huckletree Soho, our Workplace of the Month, which, as a self-styled ‘investor-first’ co-working space, aims to provide a shared working environment both for venture capitalists looking for investment opportunities and for digital media/tech start-ups looking for development funds.

James Goulding, Editor,  jamesg@binfo.co.uk