Team Communication and Collaboration Software Business Requirements

An evaluation checklist for team communication and collaboration platforms — messaging, voice/video, and file sharing — covering functional and non-functional requirements plus a vendor scoring template in Excel.

A generic checklist covers "chat, video calls, and file sharing" and calls it done. It won't ask whether the platform can enforce retention and legal-hold policies that satisfy recordkeeping rules like FINRA/SEC for regulated industries, or whether "deleted" messages are actually purged versus retained in an unsearchable back end. It skips the app-permission sprawl problem too — every integration a team adds is a separate OAuth grant with its own data scope, and most admins have no consolidated view of what third-party apps can actually read. And it won't warn you that migrating message history between platforms is notoriously lossy: threads, reactions, and pinned files routinely don't survive the move, a fact you discover only after you've already switched.

What You Get

• Functional Requirements — organized by messaging & channels, voice/video conferencing, file sharing & search, workflow/app integrations, external/guest access, and administration.
• 100+ Non-Functional Requirements — performance at scale, security, data residency, retention/eDiscovery, and compliance.
• Evaluation Template — an Excel workbook with weighted scoring and vendor comparison.

Where This Fits

• Attach to an RFP sent to shortlisted vendors and score responses on identical criteria.
• Use the retention and eDiscovery requirement rows to confirm compliance needs before legal gets involved late in the process.
• Reference the guest-access and app-permission rows when IT security reviews the shortlist.

Who Should Use This

IT leaders, business analysts, and procurement teams evaluating collaboration platforms — especially in regulated industries where retention and eDiscovery matter.