Is it really possible to collaborate and yet be compliant at the same time?  Many people think it impossible: that collaboration is too “loose” to allow compliance. 

In fact, the opposite is true: compliance, by its very nature HAS to be collaborative.  Think about it: most systems that manage document compliance are all about workflow, approvals, sending versions back and forth, sign-offs – often the very things that define collaboration.

And so – we have the notion of compliant collaboration.  A few years ago, we started talking about it using those terms and slowly the idea has caught on.  One of our slides depicts it quite nicely:

It depicts the people, processes and capabilities that define Compliant Collaboration.  But what the slide doesn’t depict is the appropriate architecture. 

The next slide gets to the architecture a bit more:

This slide shows the types of systems that can be collaborative: from early stage discovery all the way to manufacturing.  It also shows the types of users that can participate in a Compliant Collaboration: Internal, External Companies and even individual users.  Pretty powerful.  And all enabled by the Microsoft Platform.

How?

It’s all in the architecture.  While this slide doesn’t fully depict a complete architecture for Compliant Collaboration, you’ll need to stay tuned: the next blog post will be all about the architecture behind Compliant Collaboration.