People hate having to skip from one application to another to get things done. Meeting all of these requirements is a tall order, but the potential rewards are immense. The holy grail for vendors is to make collaboration a mainstream application in its own right, rather than an add-on to something else. Since then, the functionality has expanded and yet users have become even more demanding, wanting seamless connection into messaging, conferencing and video, as well as closer integration with mainstream enterprise applications - and all the while reducing dependence on email. You can check documents in and out but you can’t edit on-screen with your team. You can edit collaboratively but you can’t format reliably. Each of them has one or two strengths and a laundry-list of could-do-better. It seems to me every online collaboration platform is missing crucial pieces of functionality. As I wrote when Box Notes was first announced back in 2013, this leaves all of them lacking a complete offering: Part of the problem is that each vendor comes at collaboration from a different starting point. We're all floundering in a digital ocean of uncharted collaboration options. But despite (or more accurately, because of) this plethora of products jockeying for our attention, there's no standard toolset or accepted methodology for making it work well. These new patterns of collaboration are an essential success ingredient in a modern digital business. Suffice to say that digital technology offers more ways than ever for people to interact and share with colleagues, customers and stakeholders. Meanwhile the recently launched Microsoft Teams becomes generally available this quarter.

Next week it's expected to be the turn of Dropbox to unveil new functionality. Last week saw the launch of a major overhaul to teamwork tool Slack, including the long-awaited arrival of threaded conversations. This week Box launched a major update to its Notes collaboration canvas - more on that in a moment.

Will 2017 be the year that digital collaboration grows up? The year is certainly kicking off with a series of notable product enhancements by leading vendors in the space.

Dropbox paper