Google Apps is a collection of online productivity tools for teams. With Google Apps, all your business information lives in one place, so you can work seamlessly with colleagues, partners, and customers no matter where you are. Features like scheduling, email, chat, and sharing make it easy to keep track of updates.
Google Collaboration Apps for Students is a platform that lets students use Google’s collaboration apps together on any device. Now there’s a new way to make any team more efficient: Collaboration software from Google. And get access to powerful apps like Docs, Sheets, and Slides. More than 280 million users worldwide use this free collaboration suite every day, in their personal life and work. Our apps are designed so you can all work together wherever you are.
Teamwork makes the dream work. We help teams of all shapes and sizes move faster, do more, and be happier.
Google Collaboration Tools
There are many tools available on the internet to collaborate with your team members. Team collaboration tools (such as Google Drive , or Docs), make it easier to share documents with your team members/employees and allow multiple users to work on the same document at the same time. There are both free and paid versions of these tools, depending on your company’s budget.
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a great way to visually organize your busy life. The tool also supports sharing. Make some or all of your calendars public, so people can see when you’re free.
Want to share a calendar with just one person? It’s easy!
- Click the options button (three dots) to the right of the relevant calendar in the main list and select Settings and Sharing.
- On the next page, scroll down to the Share with specific people
- Click Add people and then enter the person’s email address.
- Choose the Permissions dropdown box and pick the privilege you want to allow. You can also change this afterward in the same section of the settings.
- Click Send.
The sharing capability of Google Calendar is fantastic for planning meetings, study sessions, or other collaborative activities.
Google Docs
Google Docs works perfectly for putting your head together with teammates. Use it while writing to-do lists, brainstorming for projects, or anything else that’s better with input from others.
Share a document with people via the same process you use for Google Sheets (above). You can also use the shareable link option in the corner of the sharing box.
Another option you have when sharing Google Docs or Google Sheets is some advanced settings.
- Click the Share button on the top right.
- In the popup window, click Advanced.
- Here you’ll see the link to share, those who have access, and an option to invite more people.
- Under Owner settings, you can check the boxes for those additional options. So you can prevent editors from changing access or adding others and disable options for commenters and viewers to download, print, or copy it.
While looking at the document, pay attention to the colorful, flag-like icons with people’s names. They tell you who’s responsible for making changes.
Google Keep
Think of Google Keep as a beautifully basic project management tool. You can depend on it as a place for notes, drawings, lists, pictures, and audio clips.
- Start sharing by clicking the Collaborator icon at the bottom of the note.
- Enter the person’s name or type in their email address.
- Click Save.
When you open Google Keep, you’ll see the last person who edited the note along with when.
Google Meet
Google Meet is very similar to Google Hangouts as both offer a video call service. However, Google Meet is intended for professionals and is a paid service, although currently free due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Google Hangouts, on the other hand, is more for consumers.
It can accommodate up to 250 participants per call for G Suite users (see below) and 100 with a personal Google account. Plus, you can check out the live streaming and recording features.
Starting or joining a meeting with Google Meet is simple. Just head to the website, hit Start a meeting or Enter meeting code, and you’re on your way.
Trello
Trello is a popular web-based project-and-task-management tool. It lays out your projects as a series of lists. Each list item—called a “Card” in Trello parlance—can contain attachments, checklists, images, deadlines, and discussion notes. Cards can be dragged and dropped between lists.
Trello’s interface is ideal for visual thinkers, and it’s flexible enough to work as a collaboration tool for business teams, a personal planner, and even a GTD system.
You can add files to your Trello account directly from Google Drive. Just open a Card, click Attach File then select Google Drive. Choose your files and click Select to upload.
Asana
Asana started out as a team task tracker but has evolved into a full-featured project management tool. You can break down projects into smaller tasks and assign them to collaborators, communicate with team members, and track goals and deadlines.
Of course, you can also upload project files to Asana. From Asana’s task pane, click the paper-clip icon, select Attach From Google Drive, and pick your file. It will be added along with the Google Drive icon.
G-Suite
G Suite is a collection of productivity, collaboration, and other utility tools developed by Google Cloud. Some of its popular tools are Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Sites.
Launched in 2006 as Google Apps for your domain, it was only in 2016 these apps were rebranded as G Suite.
Almost every team occasionally collaborates on different documents, sheets, slides, etc. For years, Microsoft completely owned this space. This made it expensive for especially smaller teams to get a hold of all these tools. Although MS 365 (formerly Office 365) is still the market leader in the cloud-based productivity suite segment, G-Suite is quickly catching up, especially in the SME segment.
A big reason for G-Suite’s popularity among smaller teams is its price. Unlike Office 365, it is available for monthly subscriptions. Price starts from $4.2 per user per month.
Discord
You are aware of Slack so we thought of shedding light on another really popular team messaging tool – Discord. Discord is a free team chat and VoIP software. It evolved in the gaming community but is increasingly used by teams for work-related communication as well.
What sets Discord apart from all other messaging tools is its emphasis on voice chat. Discord gives you an option to set your microphone to “always on”. Whenever you enter a voice channel you can immediately start talking with other members. It gives a much more intimate feel to team collaboration.
Discord has most of the features you’d expect from a business team messaging app. Although it’s informal tone and branding can be off-putting for formal organizations, it gets the job done really well. Being a freeware, it’s a completely free alternative to Slack. Unsurprisingly it’s used by over 250 million users.
Basecamp
Launched in 2004, Basecamp is one of the oldest collaboration tools in the market. It’s the product of the company (also called Basecamp) which also created a team messaging tool called Campfire. Campfire has now been merged with Basecamp – creating a collaboration tool that offers simple task management and chat in one tool.
Unlike project management tools like Taskworld, Wrike, and Asana, Basecamp doesn’t offer powerful reports, resource management or advanced PM features. However, if you are looking for a solid task manager with built-in messaging, it’s a very good tool.
One of the biggest USPs of Basecamp is its price. At $99/month you can use it with an unlimited no. of users. This makes it very attractive among small teams.
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.
Conclusion
Google has a bunch of business apps and every business would love to have a couple of good collaboration tools. Now, if you are a student or a teacher or an employee or an employer, there are a lot of collaboration tools for students. Google has a lot of product which can be used by anyone according to his need.
These tools are incredibly useful when collaborating with other people on projects. Whether you are in the same office or across the country, staying in touch not only lets you know what is happening, but it allows everyone to put their best efforts into the project. Together, these tools can help you tackle any task imaginable.