Online collaboration software is becoming more prevalent everyday with the rise in remote working, online collaboration has never been more important. Collaboration software encompasses all areas of business. Collaboration tools are integral to modern teams and organisations who want to increase their efficiency and productivity.
What is Team Collaboration Software?
Team collaboration software aims to facilitate communication between team members by providing a convenient, informal space to directly message one another, talk as a group, and share relevant content. Team collaboration tools are intended to be the go-to for users to quickly address questions, check their tasks, and access shared knowledge and files.
Team collaboration software is varied, and solutions cherry-pick from an array of features and functionality. However, all of them are characterized by their ability to give teams a freeform workspace to communicate and collaborate. Solutions aim to be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible to ensure a high adoption rate.
Team collaboration software is often implemented alongside project management software or task management software. Integrations with the aforementioned systems provide a seamless pipeline for projects and tasks to be discussed and completed. However, many team collaboration solutions can also be categorized as project management or task management tools themselves, depending on the functionality they provide. Some of these overlapping features include task creation, check-in functions, and workflows.
Collaboration software is a type of software tool that lets multiple users communicate, collaborate, and coordinate among themselves in real time.
A collaboration platform facilitates team communication through emails, instant messages, voice and video calls, and discussion threads. It also helps with online collaboration via file sharing and document management. These features allow an entire team to work simultaneously on the same file, which gets updated in real time.
All types of organizations can benefit from collaboration software, including those in:
- Advertising
- Banking
- Construction
- Government
- Healthcare
- Marketing
- Nonprofits
- Retail
- Technology
Why Use Team Collaboration Software?
Connecting a whole company sounds like an incredibly taxing and expensive endeavor. However, team collaboration tools provide that exact solution with the added benefit of a low implementation cost. Team collaboration tools enable a business to connect their entire team from top to bottom by providing channels for communication at both the individual and team levels. For teams with multiple offices or remote employees, team collaboration software also ensures everyone is involved, engaged, and connected.
Sending an email can be unnecessary for minor inquiries or updates. Team collaboration software provides a less formal (and more responsive) space for conversation between employees. Many team collaboration tools also offer a corresponding mobile app, enabling employees to rapidly communicate on the go or without leaving a work-oriented channel.
Team collaboration software cuts out a lot of the back-and-forth communication that bogs down productivity by allowing users to communicate directly within the document or content, without resorting to slower methods of communication like email. This expedites the response time and consequently speeds up overall work processes.
Companies save both physical and virtual space with team collaboration software. With content contained in a shared cloud, users don’t need to store documents in bulky file cabinets or on personal computers. Users can set up a folder structure to ensure everything has a place.
Who Uses Team Collaboration Software?
Teams and companies of all sizes find team collaboration tools useful. Team collaboration software exists to help any sized group of contributors work together virtually toward a common goal. It offers a—usually cloud-based—platform that users can access anytime in any internet-enabled location to include their voices in the conversation.
This software has been used by companies and teams boasting varying demographics. In some instances, it serves teams of 30,000 employees situated in various parts of the globe. In other cases, it’s utilized by a husband and wife team who work together as freelance designers.
International teams benefit from this software by staying up to speed with assignments on a global level. The cloud-based design means that anyone who has been permitted to edit or view a file can do so from any location, so long as they have internet access and a secure login. Files are stored in a centralized repository as opposed to chaotically dispersed among individual servers.
Team Collaboration Software Features
Messaging – Team collaboration tools almost always feature an instant messaging system. These tools facilitate one-on-one, real-time communication and the creation of team-specific spaces for group collaboration.
File sharing – The ability to share files is usually built into the messaging component of a team collaboration tool. Most solutions will integrate with a business content management system to store files automatically.
Search – Team collaboration software can archive files, projects, or conversations so collaborators can return to them at a later date. They also have intuitive search features, so users can quickly track down the content they’re looking for.
Document collaboration – Document collaboration tools allow users to create and edit documents with others in real time. These documents can be stored within the app or housed externally using another integrated content management system.
Integrations – Team collaboration software typically offers significant integration capability, allowing users to connect with their content management system, CRM software, or even another collaboration tool.
VoIP and video conferencing – Some team collaboration software solutions will offer VoIP or video conferencing or will integrate with another provider, giving users the ability to change communication methods seamlessly without leaving the app.
Task management – Task management features enable users to create tasks and organize them by status, priority, and department. This can include Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and workflows.
Versioning – Versioning ensures collaborators are always working with the most recently updated edition of a file. It also allows users to go back and look at prior drafts without converting back to that version. Team collaboration software helps users track edits and changes and keep up with the overall evolution of a task.
Calendar – Many team collaboration solutions will offer individual and team calendars that autofill with tasks and projects made within the app. Calendars can also integrate with outside email solutions as well as project management and task management software.
Trends Related to Team Collaboration Software
Team collaboration tools are among the most popular to implement in business currently. One would be hard-pressed to find a successful workplace that does not employ an internal messaging application or check-in tool. Project management and task management products are now adopting many of the features of team collaboration tools or integrating with popular, existing tools. In the future, we may see the categories merge if the features normally hosted by team collaboration products become expected within project management software.
Potential Issues with Team Collaboration Software
The team collaboration space is highly varied, which can make apples-to-apples comparisons difficult at face value. Many products and companies entered the space from a number of directions, leaving the space hazy and without a strict, concrete definition. While a number of tools label themselves as team collaboration solutions, the space may need to splinter into more well-defined categories for easier comparisons between products.
1. Slack Technologies, Inc.
Location: San Francisco, California
Slack’s business communications system uses Internet Relay Chat (IRC) applications for team members to stay in touch via chat rooms organized by topic, or private messaging. In late June, the company rolled out a new feature called Slack Connect, a business-to-business capability that allows companies to communicate more efficiently. This expands their offerings from being primarily an internal chat tool to establishing external services that can link companies while keeping all data and missives secure.
Slack’s major competitor is Microsoft Teams, and both companies saw a steep rise in use while more people started working from home to avoid exposure to COVID-19. Slack recently partnered with Amazon Work Space (AWS) in a multi-year agreement, in which AWS chose to adopt Slack for their business communications and will develop new services to enable the chat giant to increase its size and capabilities. Slack went public in April 2019, when its shares rocketed to a $21 billion valuation.
2. Atlassian
Location: Sydney, Australia
In only a few short years, university students Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar turned their hustle and their drive to up their software game into a multi-billion-dollar company, Australian software titan Atlassian. The fruits of their labor, Jira, is a complete project management, bug tracking, and all-around IT management platform. The Confluence team management platform allows for company-wide collaboration and dissemination of knowledge in wiki form, providing an easily-searchable information repository that’s already integrated with Jira’s systems and supported with an early yet still widely used array of cloud products.
Atlassian is already used by over 160,000 organizations, including companies as diverse as Carfax and Domino’s Pizza. In 2019, the company finally cemented its status in the upper echelons of the software industry with annual revenue surpassing the billion-dollar mark.
3. Zoom
Location: San Jose, California
Zoom provides videotelephony and online chat services for business, education, and leisure – especially in times of a global pandemic. The cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform has rocketed in popularity since stay-at-home orders were issued across the globe. For many companies, it provided a quick and easy way to transition to remote working and still enable employees to participate in face-to-face meetings, albeit virtually. For millions of users quarantined at home, it offered a way to connect with friends in a socially distant world.
The company went public in 2019, with its share price increasing over 70% on the first day of trading. The company closed the day with a valuation of $16 billion. By the beginning of 2020, Zoom had over 2,500 employees. Concerns over security lapses drew recent criticism, as well as the company’s decision to close multiple accounts in the U.S. and Hong Kong in the wake of human rights protests.
4. Asana
Location: San Francisco, California
Founded in 2008 by Facebook Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former Facebook and Google engineer Justin Rosenstein, Asana helps teams orchestrate work from daily tasks to cross-functional enterprise initiatives. With Asana, organizations have a living system of clarity where everyone—regardless of where they’re located—can see, discuss, and execute their team’s priorities.
While the global shift to remote work may have heightened the awareness of how difficult it is to achieve clarity at work, the problems themselves are not new. More than 100,000 paying customers and millions of teams around the world, from small businesses to large enterprises, rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to product launches and marketing campaigns.
The company recently announced Video Messaging in partnership with Vimeo. Bringing the benefits of live video communication to Asana reduces meetings, eliminates information silos and creates a single source of truth for distributed teams and timezones. This new integration allows users to connect asynchronously, delivering benefits of face-to-face communication without the tax of more video meetings or emails.
Asana also added automation features to My Tasks, a personal prioritization system that combines an individual’s to-dos with their broader team’s work, as well as a Smart Calendar Assistant Integration with Clockwise to easily schedule tasks into real time without leaving Asana.
5. Zoho
Location: Chennai, India
Formerly known as AdventNet, India- and California-based CRM company Zoho is giving the bigger tech players like Google a run for their money when it comes to enterprise workflow and human resources solutions. With its distinctive CRM platform, Zoho puts together sales, marketing, inventory management, and human resources into one convenient, cloud-based solution while integrating seamlessly with its competitor G Suite to boost enterprise intelligence and communication.
Founded in 1996, Zoho has exploded over the past two decades, currently claiming more than 60 million satisfied customers. Zoho has led the charge in enabling a swift corporate response to the pandemic and subsequent work-from-home revolution, offering free subscriptions to its platform to its millions of SMB and enterprise clients. Zoho has weathered other crises that have felled many of its competitors since its formation. And with its strategic focus on its philosophy of transnational localism in the wake of the pandemic recovery process, Zoho is well positioned to see continued success and growth.
6. Blackboard
Location: Washington, D.C.
A well-known name among anyone who has attended or worked for a university in the past two decades, Blackboard has taken learning and education software to its zenith. Providing recruitment, student success, consulting, and many other services, the company has become the de facto leading learning enterprise digital solution.
Blackboard caters to K-12, higher education, corporate, and government organizations. Its competence in connecting clients with the proper instruction assets even extends into covering campus commerce and security matters, as well as enabling more effective communication within associated communities and the industry as a whole.
Blackboard was founded in 1997 by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky; Stephen Gilfus and Daniel Cane are also credited with creation of the company via their founding of CourseInfo at Cornell University. It holds its headquarters in Reston, Virginia/Washington, D.C. and maintains offices in North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Service is provided to an estimated 150 million users in over 80 countries, helping online education facilitation for more than 2,000 unique higher education institutions.
Blackboard has teamed up with education enterprise software provider Anthology to inaugurate a new education technology, software, and platform company. The resulting organization is set to initiate its formal business endeavors sometime near the end of 2021.
7. RingCentral
Location: Belmont, CA
This company’s cloud-centric collaboration and communication platform boasts an exhaustive capability set that unites business messaging, team collaboration, video conferencing, and online meetings into one practical solution center. By harnessing the diverse functionalities of cloud technology, RingCentral reaches far beyond cloud PBX or VolP phone service to deliver UCaaS that does away with the need for on-site assets and related burdens while ensuring a smooth integration with existing systems.
The modern mobile workforce is emboldened to focus on priority items through RingCentral’s ability to bridge the multi-device communications gap. Its products and solutions have the capacity for growth and scaling relative to an enterprise’s evolution. RingCentral has been on hand to help in navigating exponential communications growth for over 350,000 worldwide organizations. Its main stable of products includes RingCentral Professional, RingCentral Office, and RingCentral Internet Fax. Services are widely available in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. RingCentral’s current CEO Vlad Shmunis and its CTO Vlad Vendrow founded the company in 1999.
The Financial Times listed RingCentral as one of Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies for 2021. A flagship feature of its application, RingCentral Video, was named “Overall Video Conferencing Solution of the Year” in the 2021 RemoteTech Breakthrough Awards.
8. Invoca
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
This conservation analytics and AI communications tracking company uses its robust technology suite to add depth to the marketing analytics experience. Due to this, game-changing insights can be applied to far more than basic digital consumer interactions. Invoca brings its expertise to call tracking, intelligence, inbound marketing, and pay-per-call advertising efforts.
Invoca’s acclaimed Active Conversation Intelligence platform bolsters communications teams with context tools to operate accordingly with consumer-provided information. By integrating with top technology platforms, revenue drivers can translate conversation data into automated action. This produces higher quality conversations, encourages useful feedback, and drives up profit potential.
The company has been recruited by leading brands such as the Mayo Clinic, AutoNation, Dish Network, and Mutual of Omaha. Invoca’s investment portfolio is marked with the names of many venture capital firms; Accel, H.I.G. Growth Partners, Morgan Stanley, Salesforce Ventures, and Upfront Ventures are among the top contributors. Invoca was founded by Colin Kelley, Jason Spievak, and Robert Duva in 2008.
The Invoca Summit Awards is the company’s annual achievement recognition event. Celebrating customers and partners for successfully interpreting and implementing the company’s services, the awards include Rookie of the Year, Visionary of the Year, and Conversation Intelligence Innovator of the Year, among many others.
9. Teamwork.com
Location: Cork, Ireland
Teamwork lives up to its name by offering first-rate groupware and project management tools to aid collaborative efforts. The trademark tools of its platform cover work management, helpdesk, chat, sales CRM, and content collaboration workspace software. Teamwork’s platform is a mainstay for organizations regardless of size or industry due to its flexible and easy-to-use project management experience.
Teamwork’s cloud application product portfolio includes its trademark offering Teamwork, in addition to Teamwork Desk, Teamwork Spaces, Teamwork CRM, and Teamwork Chat. The company’s platform is capable of integrating with marketing technology software such as HubSpot and productivity platforms like Slack, G Suite, MS Teams, Zapier, Dropbox, and QuickBooks.
Peter Coppinger and Dan Mackey founded the company, then called Digital Crew, in 2007 as a web-based solutions facilitator catering to the organizations in Cork. Their 2014 purchase of their eventual domain name was one of the priciest domain name pursuits in Irish business history, costing €500,000 (USD $675,000).
Two months ago, Teamwork.com made public an investment from venture capital firm Bregal Milestone totaling €59.1 million (USD $70 million). This funding will support the company’s ambitious campaign to generate further growth opportunities.
10. CoreDial
Location: Blue Bell, PA
CoreDial provides scalable, high-quality cloud communication, video collaboration, and contact center services. Its client companies are guided through selling, delivery, management, and invoicing processes for cloud communications products, including hosted SIP, PBX, and VolP trunking services. In its capacity as a peerless CCaaS and UCaaS provider, CoreDial sanctions over 850 channel partners to provision progressive cloud communication for around 32,000 businesses.
The CoreNexa Unified Communications platform is the company’s renowned all-in-one solution. Its newest iteration, CoreNexa 7.0, launched in spring of 2021. The updated solution comes loaded with next-gen video, messaging, voice, and collaboration features that can upgrade, augment, or entirely stand in for physical office spaces. The company also brought its CoreDial Max co-branded channel program into the mix in August. CoreDial Max is designed to aid channel partners desiring to offer CoreNexa solutions but lacking the proper assets to handle back-office processes such as collections, taxation, and invoicing. CoreDial was founded by Alan Rihm in 2005.
The current year has seen CoreDial acknowledged several times for its communication service prowess. The company was included in Philadelphia Business Journal’s list of Best Places To Work 2021, and CoreNexa 7.0 won the 2021 ChannelVision Visionary Spotlight Award.
11. Nextiva
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
This preeminent cloud communications company has revolutionized formerly ho-hum business communication and team collaboration experiences. Nextiva aids hundreds of thousands of global businesses in using its stellar communications services as a growth booster. Nextiva’s lauded solutions include chat, survey, CRM, phone service, and analytic tools.
The company’s offerings for cloud phone systems, automatic call distribution, IVR/auto attendant, and queuing and monitoring can rapidly raise the quality and breadth of a client’s communications. Its PBX Session Initiation Protocol Trunking lets users conduct business through extant phone systems without requiring the purchase of additional equipment. The subscription-based unified communication platform NextOS has brought numerous users peace of mind; it can be used as a desktop and/or mobile application.
Although it was technically created in 2006, co-founders Tomas Gorny and Tracy Conrad consider 2008 to be Nextiva’s official “birth year” because that year saw its first business transaction occur.
Last year, Nextiva was a commonality among many award and achievement lists within the sector. It was named as the Best Business Phone Service of 2020 by the U.S. News & World Report, and scored multiple medals in the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Additionally, Phoenix Business Journal recognized the company’s impressive scale by certifying it as the Largest Phoenix-Area Software Firm.
12. Airtable
Location: San Francisco, CA
Cloud-centric software startup Airtable provides a simplified and intuitive platform for creating, managing, and distributing relational databases. This company is elevating cloud collaboration by enabling real-time synergy among teams and harnessing the full power of cloud technology to streamline code-less databases.
The boosts to productivity made possible by Airtable’s platform are invaluable; the flexibility of its tools make it accessible to any type of end-user. They can generate and share their own workflows for a huge range of functions, from calendar oversight to major event planning. Airtable’s checklist-like spreadsheet visualization can be applied to all sorts of business templates, giving the user the ability to make their own custom applications without requiring coding expertise. Going further than programs like Microsoft Excel, its unique spreadsheet (or “base”) system can handle elements such as file attachments, graphs, and other content assets. Airtable was founded by the trio of Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas in 2013. Its headquarters are located in San Francisco, California.
Last month, the $5.77 billion-valued startup made its first-ever acquisition. Airtable picked up data visualization specialist Bayes Technologies, which also specializes in no-code cloud services.
13. Blue Jeans
Location: San Jose, CA
Blue Jeans by Verizon has caught the communications industry’s attention with its cloud-based, interoperable, and interactive video communication services. An early demonstrator of cloud capability, the company established a firm foothold on the technology by featuring its product integration adaptability.
Its mission was and is to blend the most enticing aspects of audio communications and visual experiences to bring video conferencing to new heights. Enterprise customers desiring interfacing tools provisioned with top-tier security and reliability at scale put Blue Jeans on the map and continue to give rise to the company’s most-prized success stories. Its customer base has, of course, expanded to businesses of all sizes. Leading brands including Facebook, Red Hat, Viacom, LinkedIn, and thousands of other companies continually enlist Blue Jeans to power their video communication fundamentals.
Corporate strategist Krish Ramakrishnan and tech industry veteran Alagu Periyannan founded what was known as BlueJeans Network in 2009. Verizon acquired the company in May of 2020 in a bid to upgrade its unified communications portfolio.
BlueJeans by Verizon was included as a winner for the 2020 Tech Cares Award for demonstrating exemplary community support during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also bestows honors to its customers with its own annual “BlueJeans by Verizon Customer Awards.”
14. Mapbox
Location: San Francisco, California
Mapbox, a provider of custom online maps, has grown the business from a bootstrapped start-up in Washington, DC, to a robust team of 500+ with offices across the world. Its products are used by tech giants including Adobe, IBM, and Snapchat.
Since 2010, Mapbox has rapidly expanded the niche of custom maps, as a response to the limited choice offered by map providers such as Google Maps. Mapbox does not have an app, but it has over 700 million monthly active users. Mapbox provides a global map, real-time traffic, location search, and navigation via its APIs and SDKs. In addition, its open-source tools help analytics companies understand big geo data, drone companies publish flyovers, real estate sites visualize properties, satellite companies process cloud-free imagery, and insurance companies track assets.
15. Pantheon
Location: San Francisco, California
Pantheon WebOps Platform powers the open web, running more than 300,000 sites in the cloud for customers including Google, MGM, Stitch Fix, and DocuSign. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers create, iterate, and scale WordPress and Drupal sites to reach billions of people globally. With Pantheon, web teams deliver results by iterating quickly, learning, and experimenting with their websites in the same way they do with virtually every other tool in their martech and development stacks.
Pantheon’s multitenant, container-based platform enables organizations to manage all of their websites from a single dashboard. Organizations including Clorox and the United Nations drive results through accelerated development and real-time publishing using Pantheon’s collaborative workflows. In 2019, Pantheon went global with its full access WebOps offering, satisfying clients who require data residency in European, Canadian, or Australian data centers. Thanks to a partnership with Google Cloud Platform to deliver all of their underlying infrastructure, Pantheon now has regional locations in the US, Europe, Australia, and Canada.
Pantheon was founded in 2010 by Zack Rosen, David Strauss, Josh Koenig, and Matt Cheney. Pantheon’s Josh Koenig, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, was Named a 2021 Top 25 Software Product Executive by The Software Report.
16. Igloo
Location: Kitchener, Ontario
Igloo has “frozen” out its competition to become a leading producer of digital workplace solutions. The company guides its clients through the arduous journey of transforming traditional intranet into digitalization realization.
Making collaboration partners out of its customers, Igloo has designed advanced solutions for workplace matters in the areas of communication, collaboration, knowledge management, culture, and engagement. The prime directive of the company is to help organizations realize the full potential of digitalization, then shepherding them into reaping the wholesale benefits.
Adopting Igloo is made easier by its nearly endless integration capacity. The software can tie into popular enterprise and cloud applications including Google Drive, Salesforce, Office 365, Dropbox, Zendesk, and Slack. Those concerned about cloud reliability can rest assured that Igloo’s Microsoft Azure-hosted technology is up to date on privacy, security, compliance, and performance standards.
The company has earned its fair share of plaudits—including many industry awards. Aragon Research placed Igloo in the Leader section of its Globe for Communities 2021 report. Igloo also scored twice in this year’s Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards, winning the Gold Award for Igloo University and Igloo Software and a Bronze Award for its ‘Building Blocks’ software training video program.
17. Highfive Technologies
Location: Redwood City, California
Highfive combines its proprietary in-room video conferencing hardware with advanced, cloud-based software to create the ultimate collaboration experience. Its practically limitless collaboration software encompasses screen sharing, video/audio conferencing, and much more. The company runs its seamless services with the hi-fi audio and 4K HD camera connections.
Seeing as Highfive’s original mission statement was “make video conferencing as commonplace as email in business,” the company has made great strides in bringing that philosophy to fruition. By combining its platform with a hardware-as-a-service model and instituting an enticing alternative conferencing tool, the company has been able to slash upfront costs and allow more clients to tap into its utilities.
The idea for Highfive was hatched in 2012 by Jeremy Roy and Shan Sinha, the latter of which was a developer for Google Drive. At that time, the company was a pioneer in introducing browser-based, one-touch, and HD-capable video conferencing services that didn’t rely on pass codes, pin codes, or IT intervention of any kind. Cloud-native business communications platform Dialpad acquired the company in 2020.
Fast Company recently included Highfive in its list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies in Enterprise Software. It also earned a spot on Digital.com’s Best Conference Call Services of 2020 index.
18. Stratsys
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
This SaaS platform empowers its customers to achieve a level of work-life simplicity that simply wasn’t feasible prior to the digital age. Statsys’s solutions for strategic planning and management gives users a chance to truly get the most out of their project and strategy frameworks. Wth GRC management solutions for risk management, internal control, internal auditing, and information security, as well as sustainability plan mapping, Stratsys has honed its digital workflow transition playbook.
In combination with GRC management, strategic and quality management comprise Stratsys’s suite—which is equipped with over 20 adaptable products and tools. Organizations are provided with complimentary DO applications, DO-board, and Meetings features with every product purchase in a promotion that’s been live since June 2020.
Stratsys was founded in 2000 in Gothenburg by Henrik Lepasoon and Magnus Pernvik. Its platform has driven progress for more than 500 organizations, engaging with around 170,000 users in over 102 countries. The company’s recent partnership deal with investment firm Verdane will help finance a new office location in Oslo, Norway, which is part of its plan to develop a strong presence in the Norwegian market.
19. Shindig
Location: New York, NY
This company has developed an innovative turnkey solution for web-based video chat events. Shindig’s approach brings the palpable grandeur (or intimacy, if desired) of an in-person, live event to every participant’s personal screen. Event hosts are equipped with functionalities for lectures, seminars, video conferences, interviews, and even audience interaction. Shindig has gone a step above other interfacing platforms with its interpersonal audience chat options, which allow observers to engage in self-initiated private video chats with others.
Founded in 2009 by Steve Gottlieb, who introduced a beta build in 2012, Shindig has grown its reputation over the years by facilitating outstanding “shindigs” for a variety of high-profile clients. The company’s earliest adopters included media outlets and publications such as CNN, The Economist, and Forbes, as well as tech industry luminaries Sheryl Sandberg and Bill Gates.
Shindig has recently become particularly popular for its usefulness in higher education. Beyond helping with remote learning transitions, the platform’s interactive features make it an optimal avenue for modern teaching. Institutions like the Harvard Graduate School of Education, University of Phoenix, Arizona State University, and the NYC Department of Education have turned to Shingdig to handle their online video instruction needs. Other current clients include USA Today and Fidelity Investments.
20. Smartsheet
Bellevue, Washington
Smartsheet focuses on collaboration and work management with a SaaS platform that can track projects, assign tasks, share documents, and manage calendars via a tabular interface. Tasks are laid out over a highly intuitive spreadsheet-type interface, which can be sorted according to priority, deadline, or team member. Users can attach, store, and share files within spreadsheet rows, with changes to shared documents being updated in real time. The platform also includes discussion boards, notifications, and alerts, and integrates with Salesforce, Dropbox, and Amazon Web Services.
Smartsheet, which filed for an IPO in 2018, raising $150 million, has seen strong growth in recent years, gaining traction with a range of smaller and enterprise-size organizations. Revenues reached $385.5 million in fiscal year 2021, up 42% year on year, with the largest individual customer deals worth north of $3 million. The company’s most recent quarterly financial results showed a 68% increase among customers who spend $100,000 a year, an indication of wide usage within organizations.
21. Grammarly
Location: San Francisco, California
Grammarly’s mission is to improve lives by improving communication. The company’s AI-powered writing assistant helps 30 million people and 30,000 teams write more clearly and effectively every day. With product offerings to empower everyone from students to professionals to enterprise workplace teams, Grammarly is helping people and organizations of all sizes around the world connect and thrive.
One of the world’s most well-known unicorn brands, Grammarly builds its product offerings to solve real communication and business challenges to help people and teams achieve their goals. Because effective communication requires more than just good spelling and grammar, Grammarly’s writing assistant provides real-time suggestions around multiple dimensions of communication, including correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery.
Users consistently report that Grammarly’s writing assistant improves their ability to communicate effectively, while Grammarly Business helps enterprises, organizations, and teams of all sizes accelerate business results through better communication. On average, Grammarly Business customers see a 20% increase in efficiency and up to a 30% increase in customer satisfaction. By giving them the confidence to know they will be understood, Grammarly empowers people and teams around the world to communicate in English with impact.
22. Panopto
Location: Seattle, Washington
Panopto helps businesses and universities create secure, searchable video libraries of their institutional knowledge. With a diverse range of products that support video recording, cataloging, and live streaming, Panopto has become a mainstay of the world’s needs for online lecture delivery strategies. Panopto is used by 22 of the top 25 universities listed on the Times Higher Education World 2021 Rankings, and streams over 700 years worth of video every month. The company has recently announced partnerships with education firms K1 and the Online Learning Consortium to expand their video-based learning offerings to more learners around the world.
Since 2007, the company has been a pioneer in video capture software, video management, and inside-video-search technology. Today, Panopto’s video management system is the largest repository of expert learning videos in the world. Headquartered in Seattle, with offices in Pittsburgh, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney, Panopto has received industry recognition for its innovation, rapid growth, and company culture.
23. simpplr
Location: Redwood City, California
With people increasingly working from home, businesses have put a focus on trying to engage and manage employees remotely. Simpplr is a modern employee intranet that drives employee productivity and attention by creating an intelligent, appealing, and integrated digital workplace. Simpplr’s software allows for employees to distribute content in a manageable and effective manner, just as they are accustomed to doing on their social networks.
The end-to-end encrypted platform also integrates with digital workspaces like Box, Google Drive, Slack, and Microsoft Office 365 while using AI to drive employee communications, create social workspaces within Simpplr, and even view analytics. Users can see which content is performing best in terms of views and engagement, allowing company leadership to personalize employees’ experiences based on what is needed most.
Simpplr is trusted by leading brands including Box, Workday, AAA, DocuSign, Eurostar, and Columbia University to connect and engage users. In 2020 alone, Simpplr grew annual recurring revenue by 130% while serving more than 300 customers at a 97% retention rate. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, with offices in the U.K. and India.
24. Fireflies
Location: Cedar Park, Texas
With roots in the computer science departments of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, Fireflies.ai is bringing voice-to-text into boardrooms and meetings to make note-taking an automatic task. Based in San Francisco, Fireflies.ai produces a platform that is like an executive assistant that automatically transcribes and takes bullet notes from users’ phone calls and meetings, enabling clients to receive the most valuable insights from any call. That AI-enabled executive assistant, named Fred by the company, can be added into business calls using integrated scheduling and meeting software like Google Calendars and Zoom, quickly and seamlessly transcribing, sorting, and sharing meeting notes with ease.
Fireflies.ai was founded in 2016 by CTO Sam Udotong and CEO Krish Ramineni, who began developing software together in 2015 at MIT, where a failure to scale a campus P2P delivery service led them to branch out into AI-powered voice recognition. After a long development and fundraising period, the company launched its product in 2020, rapidly growing to serve 10,000 teams using a bottom-up sales model. The platform is now used by companies like Twitter, Nike, Uber, Intuit, Salesforce, and more, and has been accelerated thanks to funding from Canaan, Khosla Ventures, F7 Ventures, and Stanford University.
25. Outsystems
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
OutSystems provides a low-code platform to develop mobile and web enterprise applications. These applications can run on premises or in the cloud, or through a hybridization between the two. Low-code is experiencing a surge in popularity, as it offers an intuitive option that allows developers to build applications with easy to use, drag-and-drop interfaces.
OutSystems’ Community Response Program was announced on their website as their way of contributing to action against the global COVID-19 pandemic. The company of just over 1,200 employees recently pledged to turn “up to 20 ideas focused on helping solve a global problem” into workable realities. Project support includes free access to their software for the duration of the pandemic, and full-time support from their Community Team Advocates, who work to coach and enable development teams as they turn their solutions into reality.
Common functionality of collaboration software
Most collaboration tools come with some or all of the following capabilities:
| Content management | Allows collaboration between several authors to create and edit the same document in real time. Enables users to highlight text or add comments, which can be incorporated when editing. Some solutions also allow users to organize and structure content according to the document type. |
| Document management | Enables users to upload and share files such as documents, videos, and images. Also allows users to store, track, and manage different versions of a document and apply role-based permissions to disable access to specific sections of a document. |
| Calendar management | Users can view individual and team-wide calendars to schedule appointments or meetings on the calendars of team members they are working with, irrespective of their locations. This feature may also include synchronization with third-party calendar management applications (e.g., Apple’s Calendar, Google Calendar). |
| Knowledge management | Allows users to maintain a repository of all available resources (documents, files, etc.) related to completed and ongoing projects in their organization. This process facilitates knowledge sharing within an organization. |
| Communication software | Provides communication tools that allow users to engage with other project members. These tools include internal messengers, video conferencing, discussion forums, and team-specific group creation capabilities. Some solutions also allow for the creation of an internal social network with the capability to build individual and team bios, so users can like and comment on project updates. |
| Project management | Enables the tracking of project progress by breaking projects into several tasks and setting completion milestones for each. This allows managers to assign tasks, track project dependencies, set timelines for tasks or projects, and reschedule tasks according to team schedules. Certain solutions provide Gantt chart representation to visualize project completion timelines. |
| Third-party integration | Most of the collaboration tools on the market are “best-of-breed,” focusing on a specific group of features. However, some organizations may seek software that can manage their core tasks as well as integrate with the other software tools they use, such as email software, instant messaging app, VoIP software, video conferencing software, and project management software. |
Benefits of collaboration software
Businesses can reap multiple benefits from a collaboration tool, including:
- Centralized information: Organizations with distributed teams often have problems with remote project collaboration. For teams based in different time zones, emails become ineffective when different groups work on the same document, due to issues with version control. Collaboration software centralizes content at a single location and updates it in real time, so everyone can view accurate information. Online collaboration software also creates a central repository of documents, consolidating the knowledge sharing efforts of an organization.
- Savings on operational costs: A collaboration solution offers a combination of features, such as document management, content curation, version control, task management, knowledge management, and communication tools. Paying for a number of different proprietary solutions specializing in these individual areas can be costly. Online collaboration software can help save on project costs by performing multiple functions that would ordinarily require several different tools to accomplish.
- Increased employee productivity: A collaboration solution can cut out unnecessary meetings, allowing users to spend more time on project-related tasks and make faster, more effective decisions.
What type of buyer are you?
Choosing the right collaboration software depends on the size of your business. Consider the following buyer types:
- Small and midsize businesses: These businesses typically operate as establishments with up to 100 employees and focus on specific operational areas. Such companies might consider a best-of-breed system that specializes solely in communication, offering capabilities such as instant messaging and audio and video conferencing.
For example, a small team that manages limited projects and has team members who prefer remote work, may want to consider a collaboration app that will help members communicate with each other and centralize information.
A midsize organization with an active sales force might, instead, prioritize a solution with advanced communication and conferencing features, such as web conferencing, community boards and forums, and instant messaging. - Large enterprises: Big companies typically operate in multiple areas with employees based at different locations. For such businesses, coordination is key. These businesses may want to consider an enterprise collaboration software tool that is a modular suite, allowing them to pick and choose the different modules they need.
For example, a large enterprise that has teams spread across different time zones might seek software that helps them manage complex projects or tasks that are dependent on each other. They may require software that offers document management, task scheduling, and content curation besides communication and conferencing features.
Conclusion
A lot of people are looking for the right software for communication, project management, and task management. There are a lot of them out there, but most of them leave your business communication half done.