The Collaborative Workspace Online is a simple and neat way to share information and ideas with your team. Organize written documents, content, images, videos, and emails into a virtual collage that your team members can easily access from anywhere.
In the workplace, you’re either utilizing tools to collaboratively work together or you’re not. Choose tools that will help you achieve results far greater than individual efforts. With tools that turn every interaction into an easy and fun experience, you’ll maintain a balance between hyper-personalized communication and ultimate time efficiency.
The Collaborative Workspace Online (CWO) is a service that brings the benefits of the workplace into the enterprise’s extended supply chain and trading area. CWO improves trust and reduces costs by enabling collaborative activities such as electronic collaboration, group decision support, community building, and knowledge management. There’s a better way to work together. Online collaboration tools and platforms make teams and projects more effective and efficient.
Online Collaboration Tools for working Together
In the modern workplace, most real work gets done in groups. Communication, coordination, and alignment bring results far greater than individual efforts. Achieve the balance between hyper-personalized communication and ultimate time efficiency with collaborative platforms that turn every interaction into an easy and fun experience.
The best online collaboration tools for working together are the ones that facilitate communication, coordination, and alignment. Achieve the balance between hyper-personalized communication and ultimate time efficiency with these collaborative platforms.
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
Chanty
Chanty is a simple team chat solution, with easy-to-use collaboration features, unlimited message history, and workplace apps to enable teams to foster healthy relationships through transparent and accessible communication.
It is a messaging tool that enables your team members to complete projects, activities, or tasks easier and faster. It also helps you consolidate all the information you need in one easy-to-use application.
Pros
- Unlimited searchable message history
- Inbuilt task manager
- Simple and clean interface
- Easy-to-start and easy-to-use
Explore pricing and features to find the Chanty plan that best fits your team.
Cons
- Limited in custom integrations
Nextiva
Nextiva brings all the features of traditional business phone systems to companies that work remotely or across multiple locations and time zones. Using just one robust online platform (and one service provider), you can deliver and manage reliable phone service to employees in multiple locations.
Remote and flexible companies traditionally struggle with reliable communications. In fact, LucidChart points to a Zogby Analytics study that isolated information gaps and delays as a top obstacle facing remote workers.
Nextiva helps companies overcome the remote communication barrier. Manage call traffic over the internet, establish a cloud-based call center, and so much more.
Pros
- Top rated customer service and free trial period
- Reliable cloud-based enterprise Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) with zero outages last year
- Streamlined control panel and single platform for easy management of phone, email, chat, and SMS
- Collects customer insights to supplement business decisions
- Security monitoring and protection
- Tons of bells and whistles, including automations and integrations
- Physical phones available on request
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is a robust online meeting and video conferencing tool designed to enable businesses to collaborate with their teams, clients, customers, and other businesses in real-time via the Internet.
It is particularly great for international teams and can greatly reduce the learning curve as it also supports screen sharing.
The other handy features of the platform include messaging, group chat, recording, integration with other tools, and a one-click meeting feature that instantly schedules meetings in Google Calendar or Outlook.
Pros
- Intuitive user interface
- Can host large meetings
- Allows users to record meetings so you don’t have to attend in real time
Cons
- Subscription is fairly expensive
- Requires a stable internet connection
Flock
If you are looking for more comprehensive communication features, then Flock is a great alternative for Slack (above). It is a communication tool that allows teams to have different channels, as well as individual and group conversations.
Unlike Slack, Flock is much faster with short lead times and allows users to search through all messages, URL, and files with ease. The tool is optimized to find virtually any search query regardless of its source in the channels. Further, it supports screen sharing, audio, and video calls. Flock users can conduct polls, set reminders, share notes, and assign tasks for maximum productivity.
Pros
- Has short load times
- Messages are fully searchable
- Has unlimited message visibility
Cons
- Has fewer app integrations than Slack
- Does not support automated bots
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a unified communications platform that merges workplace chat with video meetings, file storage, attachments and app integration. Your teams can host web conferences on this platform, and communicate through audio, video and chat – with both people from within and outside the organization.
Pros
- Full integration across Office 365 apps
- Ample cloud storage per user
- Provides access to Microsoft Office tools in one place
Cons
- The interface is fairly complicated
- Challenging to start
Slack
A collaboration tool which needs no introduction
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 organize 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).
Trello
An app for organising all your projects
REASONS TO BUY
+Clean, easy-to-use interface+Free version
REASONS TO AVOID
-Not many comms features
If you have ever looked into project management software and online collaboration tools, then no doubt you’ve come across Trello. Available on the web and with mobile apps, it lets you easily organize projects and work on them with colleagues.
The platform allows you to work with boards or lists, which can be organized by teams and different tasks. And within these, you can set up to-do lists and delegate amongst colleagues. There’s also the option to assign comments to cards – a quick way to give feedback to others.
Furthermore, Trello boasts a number of integrations with apps such as Evernote, GitHub, Google Drive, and Slack. You can download the app for free, but there are premium options available that give access to more features.
The Premium pricing tier unlocks a number of additional administrative features for better organization. There’s also an Enterprise edition which is priced according to the number of users required and provides some additional organizational management features.
Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a feature-rich app that will help you determine how long it takes for a task or project to get completed. You can see what your remote team members, outsourced workers, and freelancers are working on at any given time.
Once you know exactly what your team members are working on in real-time, you’ll have a better understanding of when a project will be completed, where the bottleneck is, and what is required to move things forward.
Time Doctor integrates with other top project management tools remote workers use. Integrations include Asana, Basecamp, GitHub, Salesforce, Teamwork, Trello, Zendesk, and many more.
Timely
Timely is an automatic time tracking software empowered by AI that supports freelancers and SMBs. It makes it super easy to track time to help its users focus on work that matters.
Features include automatic tracking and idle time tracking, project and task time tracking in combination with many integrations with calendars, email, video conference calls, and invoicing tools.
Timely has integrations with Asana, Trello, Todoist, Google, and Microsoft tools. It also has a Zapier integration for added functionality.
Conclusion
Collaborative Workspace Online is a high-quality online collaboration software that combines the power of social tools with the productivity of enterprise technology. It allows users to collaborate in real-time, organizes projects, instantly stays up to date, keep their conversations in context, access files from anywhere, and improve employee efficiency.
Understanding the collaborative workspace online is important for many reasons. First of all, work environments have been changing at a rapid pace for the past few decades. The world is going through a period of exponential change and the need to embrace new ways of accomplishing tasks has increased a lot. Technology has always been a part of our lives but today, it has become the most important part. With new technologies being introduced every other day, businesses have to change with them or else there is no question of competitive advantage in today’s world.
If you are like most people, you spend more time communicating with other people than anything else. Face-to-face, phone, email—these are all different ways to communicate with others.