My dream collaboration tool
My dream collaboration tool is an amalgam of Slack, Asana, email, Streak, and Google Docs.
Start with channels, like Slack. You can add and remove people to channels, they can set notifications.
Now comes the fun part. Instead of writing a message to a channel, the UX forces you to say what you are doing. (Making it a little harder to post top-level messages will help people use threads.)
Is it a topic for conversation that needs to get answered now? If so, it becomes an active chat.
Is it a topic for conversation that needs to get answered later? And by when? Then it gets added to a virtual meeting agenda stack and doesn't trigger a notification. It's easy to see how many pending agenda items you have, you can peruse the items and converse about them on your own time, or during an actual meeting, where all agenda items are exposed. No item is closed until a person says it is, so things don't get lost.
(This would also allow people to assign each other agenda items and then dynamically suggest when meetings should be held and with whom.)
Is it a task? If so, it gets added to someone's to-do list within that channel, which can then become a conversation if that person has questions. (Any message in the chat can be assigned anyone as a task.)
Also, you can send an outward facing email and have an ongoing conversation about it like Streak, that includes all conversations with a particular party. That other party can also activate the feature, have their private discussions about it, and join in a chat with your company. Bonus points if you can also incorporate social platforms like FB threads and a content calendar to plan future posts on social media.
Extra bonus points if folders and files can be integrated so discussion can happen around them for review and content creation.
One other feature I would really like: the ability for a message to become a Google Doc-style collaborative editing space. So if we are on a call and putting some ideas or numbers together, we can see what is on each others' screens.
What do you think? What would you want?"