Looking to upgrade your virtual collaboration sessions? When working online, these tools let you share content while you’re live via real time whiteboard, share with just one other person using presentation style or collaborate in a group chat room. Here are the best virtual collaboration tools for increasing productivity in your team for any task.
Probably there is no one who has not heard of collaborative tools, but not all of us really know what they are and what does each tool offer? In this article we will talk about the best virtual collaboration tools for you to use for your project work and personal teamwork without leaving your office or home.
Flowdock
Flowdock is a group and private chat platform. Its most interesting feature is its team inbox which aggregates notifications from other channels, like Twitter, Asana and customer support tools.
Microsoft Teams
With a full suite of workplace features, Microsoft’s entry into virtual collaboration is one of the most comprehensive products out there. Microsoft Teams boasts chat and video conferencing functions, file storage, and plenty of application integration with other needed workplace programs. It’s especially useful for organizations that already work with the other Microsoft programs – it features a shared workspace with programs like PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and OneNote. Various pricing options are available. An important note: Skype for Business – owned and operated by Microsoft – will be entirely replaced by Microsoft Teams by mid-2021.
Slack
With a tagline of “Be less busy,” Slack is a software program that helps businesses, employees, and clients communicate in real-time. Comments get automatically segregated into project channels that can be searched later, a rarity in most virtual collaboration systems that don’t provide a means for retrieving older messages.
Users can communicate with each other in real-time, and the organization recently unveiled a voice feature, which enables project members to record their notes on a per-project basis. There are various price-points available depending upon the size of your project, but if you need more reassurance of how user-friendly and manageable Slack is, consider this:
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is using it. Yep — the same team members that put a robot on Mars are big fans of Slack. Surely it can handle any Earth-based project you throw at it.
Yammer
Think of Yammer as a private social media site created just for your corporation. Used by 80 percent of the Fortune 500’s top companies, your Yammer network will provide real-time communication and file sharing that’s only accessible by staff who have a valid company email address or an approved IP. A small startup that launched in 2008, Yammer is now owned by Microsoft and is easily integrated into Office platforms.
Zoom
One of the gold-standard companies when it comes to enterprise video communications, Zoom provides a reliable platform for video and audio conferencing. The product offers a single communications suite for meetings, chat, and productive workplace collaboration. The product features high-quality HD video and audio (even in low-bandwidth environments), and up to 100 participants for video conferencing come included in the standard version. The product works across PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, and with traditional conference room systems or “Zoom rooms.” Different tiers of pricing from Basic to Business
InVision: The best design collaboration app & digital whiteboard
InVision is undoubtedly the most comprehensive suite of design software on the market. With a 4.5 out of 5 rating on both G2 Crowd and Capterra, and an 8.5 out of 10 rating on TrustRadius, it’s no wonder remote teams like Treehouse, Help Scout, and Trello love using it.
“InVision is one of my favorite products,” shared Nick Francis, Co-Founder and CEO, Help Scout. “The experience is flawless, little details are executed beautifully, and it keeps our remote team in sync throughout the design process.”
“InVision helps our distributed design team stay in sync,” agreed Jeremy Jantz, Product Designer, Treehouse. “We can facilitate design discussions asynchronously, track feedback from everyone on the team, and demonstrate interactions easily and efficiently. It’s the best rapid prototyping tool we’ve found.”
Some of the InVision—and Studio—team at a recent event in San Francisco
Real-time collaboration is an essential part of the design process. InVision Freehand is a digital whiteboard that allows you to wireframe, plan, design presentations, and give and receive feedback, between designers but also in conjunction with other stakeholders.
For example, Trello relies heavily on InVision for communicating with developers. “The comments are extremely valuable when it comes to feedback and questions. InVision has really become an integral part of how we work,” explained the company’s Product Designer, Adam Simms.
GitHub: The best software development tool
Designers and developers may be different breeds, but it’s essential that they work together to produce quality digital products.
From hosting and reviewing code to managing projects to building software, GitHub is ideal for remote team collaboration. It’s also the highest rated platform for developers, with a 4.7 out of 5 G2 crowd rating, 5 out of 5 Capterra rating, and 9 out of 10 TrustRadius rating.
That said, using Atlassian JIRA has a major benefit: It integrates with InVision. 😉
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.
Website
What I Like
- 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.
What I Dislike
- 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.
Final Decision
The time tracking, task management and integrations ultimately tilted us in favor of using Teamwork. But I’ve got enough complaints about Teamwork that we’d switch if something better came along.
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.
Website
What I Like
- 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.
What I Dislike
- 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.
Final Decision
The time tracking, task management and integrations ultimately tilted us in favor of using Teamwork. But I’ve got enough complaints about Teamwork that we’d switch if something better came along.
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.
Website
What I Like
- 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.
What I Dislike
- No time tracking, only time logging.
- Expensive – $79/month if we want to use Basecamp with our clients (which we would).
Final Decision
This was a very close decision, but the price tag and the lack of time tracking were stoppers for us.
Conclusion
We’ve taken a look at the best virtual collaboration tools that you can use for a variety of scenarios, including whiteboarding, classroom collaboration, and project management.