Collaborative Online Workspace (COWs) are professional work spaces – virtual space where groups of people can create, communicate, and collaborate on projects. COWs are used to support many industries, including educational environments (primary, secondary, and post-secondary), healthcare (medical, dental, vision), child welfare, social services (family support), medical research, arts & culture (museums), non-profit organizations (charities, foundations), business (small businesses, large corporations), government, law enforcement & legal services.
Collaborative online workspaces provide a comfortable, engaging and productive online meeting experience that enables you to connect your people, information and tools. These next-generation applications go far beyond our traditional collaboration packages, with real-time presence and content sharing capabilities, rich audiovisual conferencing and application sharing. This unified communications platform is built on an open architecture designed for scalability and flexibility and integrates with your existing IT environment – giving you the power to do more from anywhere.
Bonusly
Make visibility a priority this year with Bonusly. This online collaboration platform gives managers, executives, and employees the ability to see and celebrate great work through an easy-to-use interface. Helping to create a culture where recognition is part of your day, Bonusly encourages employees to recognize their colleagues and promotes workplace collaboration.
Using this team collaboration software is a breeze, as it integrates seamlessly into the other online communication tools at your business. You can use it on a daily basis without feeling like you’re doing any extra work!
Bonusly’s 360-degree recognition also makes teamwork visible to everyone and empowers employees at all levels of your company. You can show appreciation for each other and build stronger working relationships while incentivizing a culture of online collaboration.
Pros
- Analytics point out team members’ strengths
- Make it easy for managers and leaders to gather, understand, and act on employee feedback with fun, lightweight surveys of all types.
- Easy onboarding meaning employees can start using it on their first day
- Best suited for teams/companies of 100+
- Automated custom rewards for employee milestones and completed projects
Cons
- No free plan, but they do offer a free trial here
- Expanding list of rewards
Otter.ai
Otter automatically transcribes your audio into text. Text notes full of timesaving ways to search, find, and share with your team no matter where they are. Otter has several integrations with apps like Zoom that make collaboration and remote work faster and more efficient.
Price: Starts at $9.99, billed every month. Learn more on Otter.ai Plan’s pricing page.
Free Plan: Yes, with limited usage and features. Get started.
Here are just a few of the things we love about Otter and the one minus we could think of.
Pros
- Otter integrated with Zoom making it quick and easy to add live comments, delegate tasks, and action items in real-time
- Allow Zoom participants to add photos, audio, and highlights in real-time to create collaborative meeting notes
- Get a text summary of your meetings instantly, no waiting for notes to be cleaned up. No delays, no loss in productivity
- Search within and across all your transcribed conversations
Cons
- Love that Otter is available on desktop and mobile we wish more of Otter Premiums were available in the free version
Whereby
Whereby is the best way to meet over video. You don’t need to download an app or any software. Just choose your own personalized URL and meet using your browser – on mobile or desktop – in one click.
Whereby has a range of features to help you collaborate and communicate. Like Breakout Groups, virtual whiteboards with Miro, screen sharing and recording, and integrations with Google Docs, Trello and YouTube.
Pros
- Voted ‘easiest to use’ video tool – start meetings in one click
- Host meetings with up to 50 participants
- No apps, downloads or installs required
- Simple, beautiful design
- Encrypted and secure video calls
- Personalized meeting room with custom backgrounds and your company logo
- Breakout Groups to run classes, virtual events, and workshops more easily
Cons
- 45-minute time limit for meetings with more than 2 participants on the Free plans
- Not as widely known as other video conferencing tools
FreeConferenceCall.com
Like Skype, FreeConferenceCall.com is a popular online collaboration tool that allows teams to share files, share screens, video call and discuss tasks. The platform has stable and secure features including team rooms and is easy to use.
Pros
- Easy to use and maneuver
Cons
- Only Admins can set up chat groups
- Few bugs if any at all
Slack
A collaboration tool which needs no introduction
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Excellent interface+Impressive free version
REASONS TO AVOID
-Some might want more depth in security
Slack is without doubt a mighty collaboration tool, with millions of users around the globe. It’s an incredibly smart platform, and you can get it on mobile and desktop devices. It allows for the sending of direct messages (DMs) and files to a single person or a group of employees, and there’s the ability to organise conversations into different channels (perhaps for specific projects, one for technical support, general chat, and so forth).
The app also supports video calling. You can use the feature to talk to your colleagues about projects and work in-depth, without having to type everything into a DM. While this isn’t a replacement for cloud storage services, you are able to drag, drop and share files with your colleagues directly within Slack. It’s also compatible with services such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Box.
To round things off, Slack even has a free version, although unsurprisingly it has limitations (in terms of the number of messages stored, overall storage space and so forth).
Filestage
The second one in the list of tools for online collaboration is Filestage. Filestage gives teams the easiest possible way to manage the content review process. The project management software and platform makes it simple for internal and external stakeholders to leave in-context feedback on videos, images, PDFs, and more. The tool also generates to-do lists based on those comments to make sure your team never misses a piece of feedback. With Filestage, you can review and approve in real-time, external partners and clients can comment without registering, version control makes projects easy to manage and easy to see as to which stakeholders have approved a file.
What is unique about Filestage?
- Easy review – FileStage makes feedback gathering simple, you don’t even have to sign-up, if you are a reviewer, to carry out the review process.
- Comments – reviewers can directly comment on files to share feedback making the process easy and less time consuming.
- Consistency – by giving you a central place to review files and share feedback, FileStage helps you develop consistency in your feedback sharing process.
- Creative management – with easy-to-use features for reviewing and feedback sharing, FileStage aids in creative management and quick collaboration for teams as well.
- Time saver – by simplifying the process of creative reviews and approvals, the software saves a lot of time that was earlier spent by teams juggling through email threads.
Freshdesk
If you want to bring all your team together and deliver extraordinary customer support, Freshdesk is a tool that you can lean on. It comes with robust collaboration features that promote teamwork and help your team to work more efficiently. This online tool for collaboration allows you to invite team members, agents, or business partners to discuss and solve tickets at a single place. Additionally, there’s a customizable team dashboard that you can use to monitor all the customer support activities of your team.
What is unique about Freshdesk?
- Simplified ticketing – Freshdesk gives you an easy way to manage and organize your customer tickets so that things never slip through the cracks.
- Collaboration features – it also lets you share the ownership of tickets and collaborate with your team members for providing seamless customer support and service.
- Automation – Freshdesk leverages automation technology, allowing your team members to do away with repetitive tasks.
- Reporting – advanced reporting and tracking system in Freshdesk ensures that you can make data driven decisions in the future.
- Security – Freshdesk employs top security measures and SSL encryptions to ensure that all your data is complete safe as a house.
Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger’s feature-stack is functionally powerful, flawless, and is the one best slack alternative for team communication and collaboration. It can be considered as an apt tool for all sizes of organizations. The user navigation across this business chat application is promisingly seamless for any novice user. Its impressive and immersive user interfaces make each feature self-explanatory to the end-users. Troop Messenger is cross-platform enabled; it is available on Windows, Linux, Browser, Android, and iOS. Troop Messenger is coming up with an exceptional feature called an Orange Member. This feature enables the non-company employees to be a part of the application with their public/private domain email id’s. Try out your hands-on the new-age business collaboration chat application, The Troop Messenger right away.
What is unique about Troopmessenger?
- One place for all your communications – Troop Messenger offers the option to carry out audio and video calling, along with voice messaging and chat messaging at one place to unify your communication efforts.
- An-app help – there is in-app help available for users to get answers to your How tos and all your FAQs about using the app.
- Confidentiality – carry out private conversations that are not stored anywhere. Set a time stipulated time period for your chats and keep them confidential.
- Screen sharing – you can share your screen with others in your team for a better understanding of the tasks and work in real-time.
- File sharing – using Troop Messenger you can also share files instantly and easily across individuals as well as groups.
- Search – Troop Messenger gives you the option to carry out a Global Search as well as Text Search, along with advanced search filters for easy and quick information retrieval.
Conclusion
Collaborative online workspaces are designed to bring teams together in an environment that encourages collaboration, complementary ideas, and overall productivity. Collaborative online workspaces reduce the need for internal travel and can foster real-time product brainstorming to ensure teams are aligned with the messaging of the products they help build.