Today, you cannot deny the existence of collaboration tools. Some individuals advance out of the old strategy of using email to share ideas, documents, and conversations among workers. With the evolution of technology, collaboration tools are used by many organizations because of their numerous benefits. They include efficient tracking of project tasks, task management tools, secure data storage, instant messaging and so on.
In fact working in groups within a better way with collaboration tools is possible for small business owners once they have installed these online collaboration programs in their workplace.
Chanty
Chanty is a team collaboration platform with task management and video calling features. You can chat with your team and turn messages into tasks and manage them with the help of the Kanban board. Chanty integrates with third-party apps including Trello, Asana, Zapier, Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive, Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, Mailchimp, Giphy and others.
Features of Chanty:
- Instant messaging between team members – one to one messages, public and private conversations.
- Unlimited searchable message history – get secure unlimited messaging forever.
- Audio and video calls – reach out to your team or any team member with Chanty audio and video calls.
- Task management Kanban board – enjoy a flexible and simple way to manage your tasks, set a due date and priority for any task.
- Teambook – a single hub to organize your tasks, conversations, pinned messages and content.
- Voice messages – reply to your teammate instantly on the go.
- Integrations – make a simple team chat a powerful productivity tool with third-party apps.
- Pinned messages- pin any message on Chanty and choose time to get back to it.
- Discussion threads – let you stay on topic without endless history scrolling.
Platforms:
Chanty is available on:
- Windows
- MacOS
- Web
- Android
- iOS
Pricing:
- Free plan up to 10 users
- Business plan: starts at $3 user/month
Box
No offense Microsoft, but during my first week using Box, I had forgotten all about MS-Word. Working on Box showed me what it really felt like to be a constant part of a team working on a single platform.
Interestingly, my boss and I would be working on the same document on Box from two different countries, and though I could not see him, His constantly moving cursor and the additions which He kept making to the document made me feel like he was right there!
Box is a cloud-based file storage service tailored to help teams store, share, and access files from a centralized database. And to make the experience of team collaboration even niftier, all modes of file storage and sharing can be accessed from any device sitting in any part of the world.
Just a tad limitation of having internet access for it though. But not like that’s a problem nowadays, right.
Key Features
- Set passwords to your files to keep any unwanted third party from accessing your private data.
- Set expiration dates to documents to keep track of what’s important and what still needs to be done
- As a file owner, you can control and manage who to give permission to for certain files
- Take notes on Box Notes during meetings, discussions, or simple brainstorming sessions. Box Notes are accessible and visible to everyone.
- Co-edit a document with a team of more than 15 members editing, commenting, and sharing images or files on a single document in real-time
- Create as many documents as you can on Box, all your written and formulated work will automatically be stored on your Box account. In fact, every minuscule edit that you make, be it a spacebar hit even, Box will automatically save anything.
- Box offers a powerful search bar directory that helps you locate any file from a vast treasure of online documents, notes, images, PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations that pile up over time.
- Box integrates with a good 1000 business applications, so teams can share and transfer their work to other best team collaboration software from their centralized content network on Box.
Pricing
- Starter Plan – $5 per user/month. 100 GB storage. Max.10 users
Drag
Losing your focus under piles of emails is a little too familiar situation for most of us. Fret not, as Drag helps you stay organized by converting all your emails into respective tasks. These tasks can be further managed through Kanban boards.
You can also manage your team emails by creating a shared inbox. This inbox can be shared by all of your team members to take timely decisions. The tool integrates with your Google Calendar to help you stay posted about your deadlines.
Drag allows you to streamline your Gmail inbox by providing the following features:
- Convert your inbox into a Kanban board and add tasks to visualize your workflow
- Create a shared inbox for your team to manage all your team emails associated with CRM, project management, support, or help desk
- Create custom boards to add tasks of your choice from your email inbox
- Add comments and mention relevant team members through internal team chat functionality and provide instant feedback
- Assign color codes to your tasks and identify them on the basis of their urgency, or whatever works for you
- Create a quick checklist of all the things you need to do from your inbox and add due dates for staying on track
- For making roles clear, assign emails and tasks to your team members and get things done faster
- Integrate with your Google Calendar, so any task with a due date will be automatically added to your calendar and will help you stay ahead of your deadlines
Pricing
- Solo Plan – $3 a month
- Team Plan – $49 a month – unlimited users
Teamwork Projects
This is the collaboration/project management tool we currently use at Clariant Creative. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. But it seems to have given us most of the items on our list, albeit not perfectly.
Cons
- No way to see at a glance what messages/files/links are associated with a project, unless you look for them. But if you don’t know they’re there, it’s easy to accidentally overlook them.
- The dashboard is cluttered to the point of being useless, and there’s no way to customize it.
- There’s no way to open a document within the system; you have to download the document to your computer each time you open it, make changes, save the changes to your computer, and then re-upload the document to Teamwork.
- All billing must take place from within a project, which is annoying if I want to bill a team member’s time across multiple projects.
- It’s very easy to forget to check “notify by email” when I’m setting up a task for a team member.
- Requires multiple steps to mark a project “completed”.
- Calendar only shows that something is scheduled for a particular date, but shows no helpful details.
Pros
- Time tracking is easy to use. Thank you.
- Task management is robust; tasks can be set up with dependencies, as repeatable tasks, or assigned to multiple people.
- Great integrations! I can tie Teamwork directly to our HubSpot portal and our Dropbox account, and a nifty Chrome extension lets me add items to our Teamwork account right from any browser window.
- We can create milestones in our timeline.
- We can identify risks that might impact our timeframe, which keeps us focused on working around the risk.
Teamwork’s clunky user interface doesn’t do this well. Trello, on the other hand, does. The simplicity of Trello’s user view initially turned me off, but it’s turned out to be exactly what we need. As a result, we’ve moved our agency onto Trello, integrated it with DropBox and Harvest (a fantastic time tracking app), and are much, much happier as a result.
Basecamp 3
Basecamp is a major player in the world of project management software. Its latest version, Basecamp 3, is pretty darn slick and came in a close second place for us.
Pros
- As they say on their own website, Basecamp is world-famously-easy-to-use.
- The dashboard view is fantastic and everything is easy to find.
- Automated “check-ins” keeps everyone in touch on a regular basis. I love that this is automated – set it and forget it.
- The centralized schedule lets you easily see deadlines and milestones.
- Easy to see the documents stored in the system.
- Search functionality lets you find anything you need, quickly.
Cons
- No time tracking, only time logging.
- Expensive – $79/month if we want to use Basecamp with our clients (which we would)
Google Docs
Another near-ubiquitous application for creative teams. Even my three high schoolers use Google Docs to collaborate on team projects!
Pros
- Did you say “free”?
- Simplifies document storage for our virtual team by saving all documents on the cloud.
- Best document collaboration tool on the market. Multiple people can even work on the same document at the same time, with all changes visible to everyone.
Cons
- Like a dumbed-down version of Word; lacks important formatting features we like to be able to use.
- Can’t use with Track Changes or Comments, which is very important for clients to share their feedback with us.
- Have to set up a Gmail account to open a Google Docs account.
- No project management; this is a document collaboration tool only.
Slack
I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the tool du jour that everyone’s talking about. Slack is essentially an online chat tool on steroids, with some interesting functionality that makes it so much more than just chat.
Pros
- Channels allow you to keep your conversations organized
- Ability to direct message anyone on the team
- Drag and drop sharing of files
- Easily add comments about a file
- Everything is searchable, so you can easily find what you’re looking for
Cons
- No project/task management or really any bells and whistles.
- Slack seems to be a great tool for teams that need to be in constant communication. That is not a need for our team. I see Slack as a lateral move from email, not a significant improvement over email.
Conclusion
The best collaboration apps is a broad topic. Every business is unique; therefore what works best for one may not work for another. Here’s the thing about collaboration tools, is they serve one purpose, to help coworkers work together on projects….