Internal communication also plays a critical role in scientific institutions like the Stuttgart Cluster of Excellence SimTech. Especially the decentralized, interdisciplinary setup as well as the simultaneous affiliation of the scientists to their respective institutes, other associations and additionally to the Cluster of Excellence poses a great challenge for the communication and thus also the cooperation of the teams and project networks.
"In some cases we are active in so many different functions that it is sometimes a challenge not to overlook information. We receive countless e-mails every day on a wide variety of topics and with varying degrees of relevance. Especially in times of Corona, this has even increased. It has simply become necessary to provide appropriate tools to relieve the colleagues in the cluster in this respect", says managing director Dr. Jenny Kopsch-Xhema about the necessity of such a collaboration platform in SimTech.
Therefore, the board of directors and the management of the cluster decided already at the beginning of the year to introduce Confluence and successfully released the tool for operation in SimTech at the beginning of October.
"Our goal is clearly to further improve the collaboration in SimTech. Especially in a construct that works so interdisciplinary it is not always easy to keep track of who is doing research on which specific topic. With Confluence, we want to make people more aware of the potential that exists in the cluster and thus advance our research both structurally and in terms of content. Thanks to Confluence, the individual projects, project networks, but also the entire cluster can draw on the collective knowledge of others. Tasks can be distributed in a traceable and retrievable way, documents can be published for joint work and project results can be compared. Step by step, this also leads to the fact that we can significantly reduce the flood of e-mails", cluster spokesman Thomas Ertl explains the goals and reasons for the introduction of Confluence.