Are you a computer-professional wondering what a collaboration software means? Would you like to know if the online collaboration tools of today are going to be better or worse than what you have at hand right now? Well, this article is for you.
These online collaboration tools are designed to help companies of any size collaborate more effectively. They are designed for easy use, meaning that they are the perfect choice for the cloud-based business. Being web-enabled, they can be accessed anytime, anywhere and from any device including iPads and iPhones.
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.
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
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
Get a full view of all Nextiva’s products and features.
Cons
- Employees may have to change existing phone numbers
- May require a light communication and training plan if you’re replacing an existing system
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.
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.
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.
Yammer
Yammer is a private social network that helps employees collaborate across departments, locations and business apps.
Yammer is a social network that’s entirely focused on your business. In order to join your business’s Yammer network, your team member must have a working email address from your company’s domain.
In order to segregate relevant information to specific team members, you can create groups that will help reduce the noise in the Newsfeed.
Users can share posts with specific groups simply by utilizing the drop down menus below the Update box (which is similar to Facebook’s Status Box).
Skype
One of the biggest reasons that Skype is the most popular communication tool is that it’s free.
Skype allows audio and video calls between multiple devices. In other words, one person could be on a laptop and another can be on their phone. One of the most prominent features we use here at Time Doctor is the group call. We routinely have 4, 5, and 6 people on a call from time zones all over the world.
And yes, if you’ve ever used Skype, you may have run into reliability issues. But for the longest time, it was the best bang for your buck. (Now rivaled by Google Hangouts. See below.)
Conclusion
Online collaboration tools provide a flexible way to work with people from anywhere, at any time. They give designers a “virtual office,” a community to join, and a source for ongoing discussion and inspiration.
Online collaboration tools are software companies which enable online work groups to share data, information and knowledge. Teams may access these services through desktop applications or web interfaces. Data may be stored on servers owned by the software company or on servers that it has permission to access.