Collaboration tools for businesses – A recent study by SHRM found that the majority of respondents want more technology to help them collaborate on projects and manage workflows. They were able to improve their productivity and save an average 30 minutes each week with cloud-based, online collaboration software.
Think doing the same old thing is working for your business? You need to give some collaboration tools a try.
nTask
The accelerating advances in cloud computing gave rise to the concept of online workspaces, which was most vigorously adopted by IT companies everywhere. Online workspaces obliterate the need to be physically present everywhere at all times.
If anything, they allow project managers to be at two places at once. What more could a project manager ask for, right?
You’ve probably never heard of nTask. Well, that’s okay, for it’s a brand-new project management tool that recently made its way into the market and is garnering great attention by working professionals from academia as well as thriving tech companies.
nTask is aimed to help teams and project managers from all industries to help organize their projects and get work done faster. It eliminates user frustration, caused by overly-complex features.
Everything in nTask, is designed with simple functionality, to help users stride their way from one part of the application to another with minimum confusion.
And to top it all: It is a multi-layered management tool that combines all your team collaboration needs under one roof.
Key Features:
Here’s how you and your team can achieve consistent project success with nTask:
- Create checklists within tasks, set task status, and check task progress using an automated progress meter. To manage repeating tasks, set task recurrence, and get each task detail transferred within a matter of a few seconds. The same technique applies to copy a task within a project.
- Project Managers can assess team performance by reviewing time reports sent for approval by each team member. No integrations needed! With the help of a built-in spreadsheet feature, users can log total hours spent on each task, which are then generated into weekly timesheets by the application.
- Manage resource allocation, project budget, and currency using the Project Planner
- With auto-generating Gantt Charts, teams can avail the luxury of gaining a quick perspective on all their tasks and project timelines. Gantt Chart view is accessible in a single click.
- Maintain project stability and complete projects within set deadlines by identifying issues and assigning them to specific resources for a focused solution.
- Every project is subjected to potential risks that can destroy project integrity. Safeguard your project lifecycle by creating, prioritizing, and discerning the likelihood of each identified risk.
Pricing:
- Free Plan – unlimited members per workspace, 100MBs File Storage, unlimited issue tracking
- Pro Plan – Starting at $1 per user per month. Unlimited projects.
- Keep track of work and collaborate with your team in real-time7 powerful tools to manage work online and collaborate with your team members, absolutely free.
- Get Started for Free
Asana
Video calls, project tracking, handy integrations such as reminders, to-do lists, and direct requests—Asana is another heavy hitter in the team collaboration tool division.
Watch your communication and organizational woes melt away in Asana’s colourful board or list format and behold your productivity soaring through the roof.
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
Soda PDF
Sorry, we couldn’t resist. Soda PDF is the revolutionary, reliable, and intuitive portable online collaboration tool that allows your teams to quickly create secure PDF documents, save them to the cloud, sign and send, and share them with the whole team.
It’s perfect if you’re a document-heavy company managing a remote team or a connected network of knowledge workers.
Functions such as:
- Multi-step security
- Fast and intuitive professional document creation in seconds
- Customizable doc options
- Side-by-side view mode for lightning-quick comparisons
Are what make this the perfect tool for the modern knowledge sharing company.
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.
Trello
Does your team have trouble identifying goals, parsing them out into manageable tasks, and tracking progress each step of the way? You aren’t alone.
That’s why Trello, the ultimate project management software available on the web, is trusted by teams everywhere to help them get the job done. Its unique system of project cards allows you to do everything from identifying the importance of a task to gauging progress within a project.
Did we mention it was FREE!
Bonus: Trello integrates with GitHub, Google Drive, and Slack.
GoToMeeting
Robust, affordable, and replete with features such as messaging, group chat, recording, and integration with helpful tools, GoToMeeting is one of the premier online collaboration tools for business and is your answer for seamless business meetings in just a single click.
It’s the ideal solution for international teams that can’t get enough of seeing each other’s faces in HD. It even supports screen sharing to help lessen the learning curve!
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.
ConceptBoard
ConceptBoard is a cloud-based whiteboard project management tool that allows for collaborative design on all things visual. It’s basically a one-stop shop tool for designers and creatives.
Create private sessions and upload files for continuous discussion, revision, and feedback. Perfect for marketing campaigns being worked on by teams of remote creatives such as designers, graphic artists, and copywriters!
Redbooth
Oh, your team doesn’t have Redbooth? It should! It’s one of the most comprehensive and in-depth project management tools on the market.
You can create projects, assign colleagues different tasks, track hours worked, and even view fancy Gantt charts and visualize productivity in stunning colours. The chat functions keep everyone on the same page and video and instant messaging allow for fast, effective communication.
Blink
What makes Blink special is focusing on a really good mobile app experience. But what is Blink? It’s a combination of a chat application, mixed with great storage options.
You can get relevant info to your frontline team, when they need it. Due to its simple design and user focused features, you’ll find that an increase to your employee engagement.
If you make it easy to chat and share files, you’ll have a very happy team.
Google Docs
When it comes to simplicity and affordability, it’s hard to beat Google Docs. For one, it’s free. Aside from that, it’s extremely simple and effective.
Create a document, spreadsheet, or presentation and share it with a coworker. You can even get a shareable link and let anyone who clicks on it have a view.
Multiple people can edit at the same time (in neat colour patterns), leave comments, and make editing suggestions. You also benefit from the functionally unlimited storage that comes with all things Google.
Slack
Not fairly old, but this one hardly needs an introduction. If your team doesn’t use Slack, then I’m certain you’ve at least heard about it. Slack provides a centralized hub for teams of all sizes to communicate in real-time.
Communication on Slack is fortified with powerful features like:
- Ability to drag-and-drop documents, images, videos, PDFs, spreadsheets, and other file types directly into the application
- Conduct team and individual chats, to compartmentalize topics and discussions for quick and private communication
- Carry out voice and video calls with as many as 15 people at a time.
- Share video screen for an effective and more transparent manner of communication
- Quickly search any document, message, and conversation for future reference
- Manage notification settings according to your needs. Choose and mute notifications from rarely active group conversations
- Use Slack App Directory to connect to more than 900 corresponding tools and apps to limit on-screen clutter of unnecessary tabs
Pricing
- Free Plan – small teams. 5 GB file storage. Single Person Voice call.
- Standard Plan – $6.67 per user/month. Unlimited message search. 10 GB file storage per member. Voice & video call up to 15 members.
Conclusion
There are a lot of great collaboration tools for small businesses. One software development company is taking collaboration to a whole new level, developing an online collaborative workspace that runs on multiple platforms. For small business owners, this is a dream come true. Users can manufacture their own apps, customize the software however they want, and do it all from a mobile device as well as a desktop computer.