One of the great new features announced at the Apple Keynote event on 7th September 2016, aside from the new Apple Watch or indeed the new release of the iPhone 7, was a major change to the iWork suite. Watch the keynote speech to view the live iWork demo from the event.

It would seem that Apple are very much focussing their business model to push more in to enterprise and academic facilities.

To support this push and shift in direction Apple have made a major change to their iWork suite of applications, which I was interested to note from an enterprise perspective and in particular from the perspective of supporting project teams.

Whilst predominately large organisations / blue chip organisations typically utilise Microsoft tools for both tracking, reporting and collaboration across projects and teams.  For example document storage and collaboration being covered by Sharepoint, tracking via Microsoft project and reporting via excel and PowerPoint.  Apple appears to be looking to push in to this area from an enterprise perspective, which will take time for organisations of this size to shift allegiance, if indeed they bother.

However, from a small to medium sized business perspective, the ability to shift and adopt these applications and supporting hardware is far easier.  In fact a number of these organisations will already be utilising Apple hardware and supporting applications. Although it is possible to access iWork from a PC via an Internet browser.

As with larger organisations, small to medium size businesses are in a state of business change as they initiate changes to support the required shift, whether through process changes or technology related changes, to maintain market or indeed increase market share.

This is where the iWork suite of tools, with their new free real time collaboration, through iCloud will be a fantastic mechanism for the capturing, storing, sharing and reporting of project documentation.  And these tools are free, which is even better for organisations of this size, where budgets are tight.

The project team can be working on MacBooks, iPads or indeed iPhones and have access to all of the project documentation, meaning it is easy to create, review, share, approve and report.  Being able to access project documentation, real time, across such a large selection of devices in such an easy way, can only be a good thing for the project, as predominantly access is an issue and all of the documentation is stored in the cloud, so it is possible to access from anywhere whenever you want !  It also allows for real time collaboration, so changes can be made real time by th project team members and is visible to all team members who are taking part in the collaboration. This will significantly aid project deliverables being reviewed and approved to support an efficient and perhaps significantly faster progression through the supporting project lifecycle and governance.

As with all functionality that allows easier collaboration and access, organisations will have to pay particular attention to how this information is controlled, to ensure that their is no risk of the information becoming available to the public domain. iWork free real time collaboration offers both private and public access, controlled from within iCloud.

However, the utilisation of this great new free real time collaboration functionality from iWork with a supporting project schedule, available for free, see our earlier post.  Should be a great addition to any project team who are helping to deliver change within a small to medium sized organisation.  And this is the first steps from Apple with regards changes to their iWork suite, I am sure that more great features are planned, which will build on the collaboration functionality.