Group Project Tools is the ultimate desktop collaboration tool for group projects, group chats, shared to do lists, shared calendars, and more. Stay organized so you can stay in touch from any device.
Group Project Tools (GPT) allow participants to exchange information and results within a group easily by using a tablet, laptop or desktop computer at their own time and place. It saves the time and efforts of coordinating meetings and exchanging documents.
Types of team collaboration tools
The primary types of team collaboration tools are file sharing tools, instant messaging (IM), cloud storage, online whiteboards, document synchronization, video conferencing and calendar sharing tools.
File sharing tools enable teams to quickly distribute and transfer files and provide access to other members. These tools remove the transfer process from email, relieving inboxes from the distracting flood of heavy files and notifications. Shared files can be anything from documents to videos or even software.
IM tools enable teams to exchange text messages and online files in real time. Video files, voice communication and video conferences are supported by most IM apps.
Cloud storage tools enable data to be stored remotely within a telecommunications network. This creates a centralized location for information that all team members can easily access.
Online whiteboards replace traditional, physical whiteboards and provide teams with a place to communicate visual information through graphics, drawings and text, all of which can then be quickly erased.
Document synchronization tools match two documents, making all edits in one version effective in the second version as well. This ensures that both documents are identical and that employees always have the most recent version of the information.
Video conferencing tools provide a way for various people across multiple locations to communicate in a live, visual conversation using video. Video conferencing enables teams to benefit from in-person meetings without having to commute to an office.
Finally, calendar sharing tools enable users to schedule appointments without consulting each person involved. All participants’ schedules and conflicts will be visible on a central calendar, enabling the person organizing the meeting to quickly find a time that works for everyone and send an invitation, saving time and fostering teamwork.
Zoom
Zoom is a video conferencing software companies can use to run everything from video calls to webinars to online meetings. Its founder was a lead engineer at WebEx—another video conferencing company.
Price:
Zoom has flexible pricing, allowing customers to customize their subscription. For example, they have plans oriented solely around webinar and/or event-hosting, and plans catered to setting up video conferencing systems in conference rooms. Their plans are also organized based on the size of your team(s).
Zoom’s Business plan is $19.99/month, making it much more affordable than other big players in the video conferencing space.
Ease of use:
Based on G2Crowd, an established peer-to-peer review site, Zoom is considered a user-friendly platform. People can easily start or schedule a meeting with one click.
Benefits to team productivity:
Zoom is a must-have for companies today. It can replace phone conferencing as a tool for including remote workers—and it solves those awkward moments when people start to talk over each other because they can’t see each other.
Screen sharing options allow everyone to look at one document or visual at the same time, and meetings can also be recorded for future reference or for training purposes.
Overall rating:
Regardless of which option you choose, a video conferencing system should make up a core component of your team collaboration tech stack. With today’s distributed workforce, video conferencing is a must—not a nice-to-have.
Asana
Asana is a project management software used to help teams improve the organization, tracking, and delegation of projects. It was founded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook.
If your company manages a lot of cross-functional tasks and projects, Asana may be the right solution for you. The web and mobile versions of the application allow users to input projects, create subtasks, and assign action items to other team members. It also offers users the flexibility to choose the view that works best for them, whether that’s viewing an entire project or viewing only their assigned action items.
For teams who conduct projects in sprints—such as product management or engineering teams—Asana can be extremely helpful.
Pricing:
Asana has gotten some flack for their complicated pricing. Pricing is based on a per-seat basis, which is common enough, but the features included with each plan are specific and numerous.
Thankfully, you can toggle the pricing with their interactive calculator to quickly get a sense of how much you’ll be investing in the project management tool.
Ease of use:
The UI is relatively intuitive and easy to navigate. There are multiple ways to visualize your projects to fit the type of project or the preference of the user.
Asana has a healthy, robust online guide to help new users learn the tool. However, first-time platform users might struggle to learn the jargon native to Asana.
Benefits to productivity:
Asana is most effective if user adoption is company-wide. Some teams or departments may find it more useful than others, as their work may be more campaign- or sprint-based.
The act of inputting each project or task into the tool may not be how every person chooses to go about organizing or socializing their work. So expect some resistance if you decide to roll it out to everyone.
Overall rating:
Asana gets a 4.3 rating because of their complicated pricing strategy and the fact that it’s not a task management methodology all employees will enjoy. If team members prefer organizing tasks differently, Asana can be restrictive.
As a collaboration tool, Asana checks most boxes, as it creates visibility across the company into what every team is working on (as long as the workspaces are public) and is excellent at task management.
Teamwork
Teamwork is a growing project management software trusted by over 20,000 companies. It’s simple to use and allows you to manage multiple complex tasks with ease.
It is not only powerful and easy to use but is also very flexible allowing you to customize your workflow.
Price:
Teamwork offers a number of different pricing plans meaning you can choose one which is right for you depending on your usage and requirements.
Pricing plans can be monthly or annual and range from free through to an enterprise package which would require quote depending on requirements. There is also a 30 day trial option for newcomers.
Ease of use:
Teamwork pride themselves on the ease of use of their platform. Features such as dashboard, board view and project health status updates allow multiple tasks to be tracked.
The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, even if you have never used the Teamwork platform before. Should you run into any trouble however, they have a comprehensive blog and a helpful and responsive support centre, both online and with Telephone options.
Benefit to team productivity:
Teamwork can increase your business efficiency. You can:
- Set up chat channels to communicate with other team members.
- Manage multiple projects simultaneously.
- Monitor tasks at a glance.
- Track time spent on certain tasks and/or by individual team members.
- Manage resources and capacity for workload optimization.
Slack
Slack is the communicative tool of communicative tools. It is to team collaboration what Google is to search engines: the be-all end-all.
With millions of users across the globe, Slack allows employees to send direct messages and files to independent users and allows entire teams to organize chats into specific channels for separate projects or general team banter (for example, a work-related chat and an “employees only” group for good-natured fun).
You can drag, drop, and share files with ease, though it’s not a great solution for cloud storage.
Google Keep
Part of Google’s ever-expanding dominance of all things “the Internet”, Google Keep is their note-taking rival to Evernote and OneNote, and it has quickly become one of the best tools online.
Quickly take and save notes, photos, voice memos, and checklists, and share them with your team. With integration into Google’s suite of services, it’s impossible to beat the flexibility and convenience.
Yammer
The business social network, Yammer, is a veteran of the online collab scene:
- Like each other’s statuses
- Create your own ingroup with company emails
- Chat privately or in the open
- And share documents with ease
It’s all as easy as logging in and saying hello!
Yammer is the most widely used of all team collaboration tools, and it’s one of the best ways to increase employee bonding, collaboration, and morale.
Conclusion
Group project tools is a multi-user answer. It is intended to help you with all your burning questions about your awesome upcoming group project. Group Project Tools will allow students to search engine optimize their game. On top of that, Group Project Tools will allow math students to calculate several different equations for the group project. It will also help English students by supplying them with examples on how to write awesome essays and short papers. Finally, it will teach foreign language students how to say awesome things in awesome foreign languages like how to say awesome in French or awesome in German!