Collaboration and Productivity Solutions allow employees to connect with each other, share ideas, and work together to create new business opportunities.
Collaboration and Productivity Solutions—make it possible for people to work together in a whole new way. With the help of these solutions, teams can turn ideas into results faster, make better decisions, and create greater value for customers.
Nectar
Nectar is an award-winning employee recognition & rewards platform that bolsters online collaboration. It creates a simple, standardized way for organizations to give out recognition, spot bonuses, awards and wellness challenges all within budget. This includes peer to peer recognition as well as manager to direct reports.
With Nectar, you can reinforce great work anytime, anywhere through an interactive recognition feed. Keep morale up, teams connected and promote your company’s core values in an online working environment.
Pros
- Connects with your other tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams and more to make recognition as seamless as possible
- Has a robust rewards engine with hundreds of global gift card options or branded company swag
- Unlike others in this space, Nectar aligns with its customers through Fair Billing. You only pay for ACTIVE users instead of per employee per month. They also don’t do contracts or implementation fees.
- Has a free tier along with paid plans
Explore pricing and features to find the Nectar plan that best fits your team.
Cons
- Wish there was more functionality on the free tier
- Reward options are limited outside of the US, UK or Australia
Hubstaff
Remote and asynchronous teams face communication challenges that in-office teams don’t. With Hubstaff’s stopwatch-style timer, teams can track time and see real-time updates from their desktop, web browser, or mobile device.
A virtual dashboard lets them view activity scores, enable optional screenshotting, and set productive and unproductive apps and websites for each member of their team. Integrations with over 30 popular project management, help desk, and HR apps make Hubstaff even more powerful for growing teams.
Pros
- Beautiful UI/UX
- Simple tracking
- Unlimited screenshots
- Automated timesheets
- Customizable invoices
- Easy team payments
Cons
- Relies on integrations
- If you’re looking for just a time tracker, there are free options that don’t provide the same features Hubstaff does but are cheaper.
Nifty
True collaboration is where communication meets action. If you’re planning in one place and discussing in another — where is the collaboration truly occurring?
Nifty is the award-winning project management tool that closes the gap between communication and action to serve as the all-in-one remote office you and your team have been looking for. Packed with easy-to-use project management tools as well as direct and group messaging experiences, Nifty is the glue between planning and execution.
Pros
- Build roadmaps with Nifty’s milestones which are phase-based Gantts that roll up tasks into actionable steps and automate progress as the tasks are completed.
- Timeline, Kanban, List, and Swimlane views let teams of all types visualize their work in the way that suits them best.
- Tags scale across tasks, docs, and files in all projects to create scalability within the workspace
- Built in docs, including a two-way Google Doc, Sheet, and Presentations bring your notes, content, and specifications directly into your workspace.
- Overviews, Workloads, and All Tasks give automated managerial insight on project and portfolio health and make managing resources across projects as simple as can be.
- Project Discussions and Team Chat give opportunities for group and direct communications
Cons
- API in the process of being opened
- Free trial, but no Free plan
Asana
If you’re a well-established enterprise with an inundating number of teams, rigorously working to meet impossible deadlines and tackling hard-to-impress clients, then Asana is one of the top collaboration tools for your organization.
Asana is one of the oldest project management tools, which explains the sophisticated level of workflow solutions that are to this day unparalleled by any software out there.
Just how useful Asana can be for managing your projects, take a look:
- Visually creative Kanban boards to help manage and organize work into separate compartments with an easy drag-and-drop option.
- Map, modify, and share the project plan, created on a Timeline with intersecting tasks, due dates, and milestones
- Graphical representation of work reports with a quick summary of task progress, that can be viewed by everyone on the team
- Custom fields that display task priority, total time spent, and mode of the channel to enable teams to keep track of what is most important
- Asana integrates with 100s of other team collaboration apps to facilitate team communication
Pricing
- Basic Free Version – 15 members, unlimited tasks, projects, and conversations.
ProProfs Project
ProProfs Project facilitates team collaboration by offering many key features. The best part of using this tool is you don’t feel the need of having any sort of training because it is simple to use. Using this software, you can bring transparency into operations and decide when collaboration is needed.
Key features of ProProfs Project that help you with team collaboration are:
- Task comments: Your teams can drop comments on a particular task if they want to share their inputs or need clarification. It keeps the hassle of going through messy email threads at bay and makes collaboration easier
- Email notifications: Whenever one team member leaves a comment or assigns a task, all concerned individuals receive email alerts about the same. It prevents delays and paves the way for quick collaborative work
- Shared project calendar: ProProfs Project lets you plan tasks for the entire month via its ‘Calendar View’ feature, and it allows you to set events for collaborative work
- Mobile apps: Mobile applications for Android and iOS users are available, which enables all team members to collaborate anytime, anywhere
- File sharing: Teams across different departments can share files on the go so that their collaborative work goes smoothly
Pricing:
- Free Plan – You can use it for up to 3 projects and access all basic features
- Essentials Plan – It starts from $2 user/month (billed annually) and allows access to more essential features
- Premium Plan – It starts from $4 user/month (billed annually) and allows access to all premium features
Wrike
Wrike is one of the top favorite collaboration tools.
It helps every team be it across the hall or be it across the globe, to perform their best. It enhances communication, accountability, and transparency in all the workflows to achieve faster results. It is a very powerful tool for collaboration and managing projects.
Key features:
- Effective team tracking and managing deadlines.
- Real-time dashboards.
- Efficient project planning.
- Live news feed and activity stream.
- Easier, clearer, and more productive communications.
Pricing:
Free for up to 5 users, Professional Plan, Business Plan, and Marketers plan for $9.80 per user/month, $24.80 per user/month and $34.60 per user/month respectively.
Enterprise plan: Price on demand.
Hiver
Hiver is an email collaboration solution built for Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite). It is easy-to-use, intuitive, and offers a wide range of features to facilitate seamless collaboration and higher productivity amongst team members.
From one-click task delegation to swift internal collaboration to advanced analytics, teams can do it all within Gmail’s native interface.
Key Features:
- Assign emails as tasks in a single click, without having to rely on forwards. Track the status of all tasks in real-time.
- Use Email Tags to organize workload into different categories
- Make use of Notes to have quick, contextual discussions with team members. This way, teams can avoid sending internal emails that only add to clutter.
- Leverage automations to save time on grunt work and build efficient workflows. Automations can be used to assign tasks to colleagues, categorize tasks, change the status of tasks, and more — with zero manual intervention.
- Track team performance by accessing various types of reports and staying on top of key metrics.
Pricing: Hiver comes with a 14-day free trial, following which you can choose between 3 pricing plans. Growth ($22 per user/month), Pro ($37 per user/month), and Elite ($57 per user/month).
Cisco WebEx
According to Cisco, 37% of employee time is spent in meetings.
While most meetings are a drag and a waste of time, we can’t deny what perpetual necessity meetings are for team collaboration. It is for this reason, Cisco WebEx, one of the most powerful meetings management software is included in this list.
Use Cisco WebEx to streamline an over-bearing bundle of meetings with the following perks:
- Share screens, host webinars and video conferences with WebEx Floating panels
- Schedule meetings using Quick or Advanced Scheduler. Users can send meeting invites via SMS, email or IM.
- In case of a dead battery or technical constraints, WebEx facilitates the immediate device switch option in connection with the meeting remains intact.
- Record meetings to revisit old discussions from the past
- Monitor meeting safety by setting a password to each meeting
- Use Brainstorm tool to gather real-time votes from team attendees
Pricing
- Premium – $24/month. 8 members. Video conferencing and screen sharing.
Conclusion
Collaboration and Productivity Solutions is the platform at the heart of the modern workplace. Whether you need to connect to legacy systems, share data with internal groups or track high volumes of data, Informatica provides you with all the workflow orchestration capabilities that will enable you to achieve your goals.
Our collaboration and productivity solutions transform how people communicate and share information within a business. Our products include desktop, server, and cloud-based unified communications, video conferencing, telepresence, content sharing, mobility management, application integration, and remote access solutions.