What are the online collaboration tools for business? What are all of the various kinds of collaboration tools that are available for business use, and what are the possible benefits of each one? Collaboration tools are software programs meant to help businesses communicate with one another. These programs can help companies improve projects, collect information from multiple sources, and organize work tasks. As you’ll learn below, there are many kinds of programs that fall under this definition, but they each have similar general uses.
The Online Collaboration Tools for Business help you and your team work better together. Services include: – Cloud-based storage and sharing – SaaS applications – Office automation tools – Collaboration applications
monday.com
What would it mean for your productivity if you never had to check email, Slack, Salesforce, and Excel just to track down information about one project?
Whether you’re working in the office, from home, or from across the globe, monday.com helps your entire team stay in sync. This work operating system (Work OS) keeps all of your work clearly organized on one visual platform everyone can access.
Without any coding skills, you can customize monday.com so that it works best for your team. Automate data entry, workflows, and other repetitive tasks, so you can focus on more meaningful work. Then assign tasks so nothing falls through the cracks.
Plus, we surveyed 1,273 executives that use collaboration tools on a regular basis. And they voted monday.com as their favorite platform.
Pros
- Sign up for a free trial without entering your payment details
- Download pre-designed templates perfectly suited to your workflows
- Get the “bird’s eye view” of multiple projects in one convenient location
- Check your progress at any time from the mobile app
- View your projects in a calendar mode so you never miss any deadlines
- Assign new tasks to available team members so no one is overloaded
- Automate your workflows without coding
- Integrate all of your other apps on one unified platform
Cons
- Mobile app can be cumbersome, but they are working on it constantly
- More content on advanced concepts
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
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
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
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.
Microsoft 365
Share and edit documents, now with messaging
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Familiar software+Collaborative editing+Teams provides UC+Cost-effective bundling
Microsoft Office may not be the first platform you think of when it comes to collaboration, but this now runs at the heart of the Microsoft 365 cloud-based office suite.
This is important because Microsoft Office remains the most used and therefore important office suite out there, and while there are competitors such as OpenOffice and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) they still haven’t caught up to the same level of functionality and ease of use.
Therefore as Microsoft Office is likely to be at the heart of many businesses, the move to Microsoft 365 offers a number of advantages, not least the ability for teams to collaborate directly on the same set of documents. This could be anything from work shifts in an Excel spreadsheet, to a presentation in PowerPoint, to client reports written in Word.
Added to this is that Microsoft Teams now comes bundled with a number of Microsoft 365 packages, allowing for Unified Communications integrated with the traditional office software.
What makes Microsoft 365 more attractive is that as a cloud-hosted platform it can be used not just with Windows, but also Mac, Android, and iOS.
Pricing depends on whether you are buying for personal or business use, with fees starting from $6.99 or $8.25 a month per use, with business use requiring pre-paid annual plans.
However, one little advertised alternative option is Microsoft 365 Business Basics, which offers most of the same software packages and options as above, but only comes in at $5 per month per user when paid annually. This makes the entire package extremely cost-effective, especially when compared to standalone UC and collaboration software prices.
Overall, Microsoft 365 doesn’t simply offer a great office suite, but one that is also firmly designed for collaboration and sharing with teams.
Conclusion
The Online Collaboration Tools for Business gives businesses the tools they need to be more productive online. Sales tech support, meetings technology, collaboration, align social media marketing campaigns and much more.