Collaborative workspace software, also called enterprise social software or workplace social software, is a kind of enterprise application software that provides planning tools to organize employees’ workflow to achieve business intelligence. It ensures the collaboration and sharing of information between departments, team members and partners, improving the business operations by means of sharing knowledge. At the same time, it creates interaction among employees, improving the sense of work community among employees.
Collaborative Workspace Software (cWS) is the easy-to-use, cloud-based software that turns enterprise applications into highly collaborative, social tools. Employees can now collaborate, regardless of their location and device, and enterprises gain increased productivity and reduced costs.
GanttPRO
GanttPRO is an advanced project collaboration tool based on Gantt charts. It gives teams lots of possibilities to collaborate on their projects. To start with, GanttPRO offers robust task management with dozens of settings like statuses, priorities, assignees, duration & estimation, time tracking, deadlines, and many others for you to know who is working on what. Further, teams feel home here, like they wouldn’t need anything to collaborate on any project-related information: real-time descriptions, comments, attachments, and notifications do all the collaboration work. One more great feature is resource management that allows the reallocation of overloaded/underloaded resources efficiently. The learning curve is pretty short, so you and your team can easily give it a try.
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.
Instant messaging
Being able to instantly message anyone on your team has become an expectation in modern-day teams. Even email communications are considered dated.
Collaboration tools generally give you group and one-on-one messaging, as well as specific channel or tag-based messaging.
For instance, monday.com, alongside messaging, offers in-context notifications to cut down on emails and intranet reliance:
Chanty
Chanty, another great online collaboration platform to your business messenger. It helps teams foster healthy relationships while improving the way team members collaborate. Make your team communication transparent and accessible. By featuring instant messages with plenty of storage space, an unlimited searchable history, and handy file sharing you can enjoy seamless communication with your teams.
What is unique about Chanty?
- Chanty integrations transform a simple team messenger into a powerful business tool
- The artificial intelligence powering Chanty team messenger uses machine learning to predict responses.
- Super fast desktop and mobile apps with a clean and intuitive interface.
- Chanty lets you communicate with your team via high-quality audio and video calls that will be available in the public beta.
Jira
Jira is a popular solution with developers for its issue and bug tracking capabilities. While it is a holistic work management tool for a number of functions and departments, it has become popular among software development teams for its ability to be used for coding, general collaboration, test case management, and release stages, as well as its intuitive integrations with key add-ons.
Confluence
Confluence allows developer teams to collaborate, generate new work, and organise projects and workflows. Offering seamless information flow, users can transfer information from impermanent conversations to company-wide knowledge, make use of multiple devices adopting an asynchronous communications style, or make use of a dedicated collaborative workspace for real-time reviews and feedback.
Slack
Unlike some of the other options on this list, Slack has its own built-in 1:1 audio/video calling features and chat messenger, making it one of the go-to team collaboration tools for over 10 million daily users.
Though primarily used as a chat messaging app, both the free and paid versions of Slack offer numerous features and app integrations that can quickly transform it into a highly-customized communication and task monitoring tool.
Users can create public and private groups and direct chat messaging channels according to the topic, department, project, and more. Within those conversations, users can tag each other, upload files in multiple formats, react with emojis, and reply to messages directly in a thread.
Users can also upload polls to chat, create shortcuts, set reminders, and update their status in Slack. Muting and starring messages makes it easy to ensure that you stay on top of all messages while not being disturbed when necessary.
Slack’s free plan allows users to:
- Create an unlimited number of channels
- Integrate up to 10 apps
- Store/Search the past 10,000 messages
- Enable two-factor authentication
- Share files and store up to 5 GB
As of this writing, screen sharing and annotation in Slack are only possible with paid plans, but both features are native to the app itself. Our list of Slack alternatives provides options that offer screen sharing and annotation in free versions. In order to share screens within the free versions, users will need to integrate tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Best For: Slack is best for remote or in-house small teams that primarily communicate via chat messaging and create channels per department, team, or even project. Teams that operate in a primarily collaborative environment that need to be able to communicate with each other instantly — but without email — will also enjoy Slack.
HeySpace
HeySpace is an innovative task management software with extensive chat features. It comprises three elements accessible in one place – channels and team members, chat window, tasks. HeySpace uses Kanban board design to allow you to easily monitor and manage tasks. Every task can be adjusted (you can change progress, add tags, files, description, set dues date, assign it to a team member, or comment on it).
You can access the Kanban board from the main view or from the “board” window. Thanks to that you can see the progress in the real-time and easily manage the workflow. You not only have the access to all tasks or projects but you can establish a unified communication channel in your organization.
HeySpace allows you to create that powerful hub where everything important is at reach. This virtual workspace software helps you and your team stay on top of work, regardless of location even during intense collaboration sessions.
BlogIn
BlogIn is a beautifully simple internal blog and knowledge-sharing platform for teams of all sizes. The internal blog acts as a central information hub or a ‘virtual bulletin board’ for the company, allowing all employees to stay in the loop with what’s going on in and around the office.
At the same time, the blog opens a new, transparent, two-way communication channel inside an organization, where everyone can ask a question and get the information they need to make faster and smarter decisions. The internal blog is intuitive and easy to use, so everyone can quickly get on board, which is one of the reasons why it works so well as the internal communication tool.
Bluescape
Bluescape is another digital platform for people to meet, share and develop ideas. This virtual workspace software allows you to use all your favorite tools in one place as they are accessible from the view of the main board which displays all features. With Bluescape you can involve everyone in the process of creating a product or managing a project and quickly exchange ideas and provide feedback.
Bluescape is a great software for teams who want to improve collaboration and keep everything in one place. You can collect all the data and files to manage content, discuss, and manage tasks.
Mural
Mural is an interesting virtual software for people who are creative and like to try new things. The tool is fantastic for designers but it will be suitable for any type of business. Mural allows you to collaborate in one place no matter the location and time zone. It’s a cloud-based software so you can access it from any place, on any device.
In Mural, you can create individual workspaces to collaborate on different projects simultaneously. You’re informed whenever employees leave or join the project during its different stages. The frameworks of Agile, Lean and Design Thinking methods make it possible to scale processes across the entire company.
Moreover, in Mural your team can freely share ideas and thoughts and get feedback in the real-time. Mural is a simple, digital way for collaboration. It visualizes every project for transparency. However, the tool is best for creative teams and if you need more sophisticated software for communication and transfer of information, you may not be satisfied.
Conclusion
Collaborative workspace software can easily continue collaboration of documents, automatically track changes, view real-time version histories, and even resolve conflicts. From the perspective of people who are working with documents on your site or on your network, this is entirely transparent. This article reviews the reasoning behind collaborative workspaces along with reviews reviews reviews reviews reviews reviews features of several products which make use of this technology.