Collaboration tools are designed for teams. A team is a group of two or more people working together to achieve a common goal. Most teams collaborate in order to be more productive through knowledge sharing. Collaboration tools can help close the distance between people in virtual teams or distributed teams that are not working side by side all time.
Collaboration tools allow team members to work together, even if they are located in different places and communicating only electronically. Example: Evernote – The popular note-taking and organization app or Trello – a web-based project management application.
TimeCamp
TimeCamp is widely known as an automatic time tracker, but also helps teams and freelancers manage tasks efficiently. Its unique project structure allows the user to add as many tasks and subtasks to the projects, so it’s easy to assign hours spent on working for each customer.
The tool offers a wide range of reports, so that managers know exactly how their teams are performing.TimeCamp minimizes time spent on filling timesheets manually. Desktop app works in the background and tracks time for each activity performed during working hours, then it assigns them to the appropriate project. Saves a lot of time for being more creative!
Pros
- You can define different billing rates for specific users and groups
- Easy to invite your clients to let them keep an eye on time and resources spent for their project
- Attendance module allows managers to track employees workdays, leaves, vacations and holidays
- Employees can fill their timesheets automatically with activities tracked during work hours
Cons
- Some users point the UX is quite outdated
Toggl Plan
Toggl Plan makes it easy for managers, stakeholders, and team members collaboratively plan and deliver projects. It makes collaboration easy with color-coded visual overviews, making communication transparent, keeping all work related information in one place.
Managers can plan work based on team availability and workloads.
Team members get clear visual cues and notifications about what’s coming next. Plus, team members can work together on tasks. As well as, share ideas with task comments and file attachments.
Stakeholders can stay up-to-date without bothering about day-to-day activities with shared timelines.
Pros
- Start with 14 days for free. Basic plan is always free
- Improve work clarity with simple, intuitive, visual overviews
- Plan work with high-level or detailed, color-coded project plan timelines
- Set milestones and track work progress
- Manage team availability and workloads with team timelines
- Deliver agile projects iteratively with scrum and kanban boards
- Work closely on tasks with other team members. Discuss ideas using comments and file attachments
- Manage work better with Google Calendar, Github, Slack and Toggl Time Tracking integrations
Cons
- The mobile app doesn’t have all the features from the web app. But new features are being added continuously
Asana
For project management, few other tools can beat Asana. The tool is designed to let teams organize, track, and manage their work. It is complete with video calls, project tracking, and handy integrations such as to-do lists, reminders and direct requests as its core features. By updating in real time, it helps project managers run a team of remote employees with ease.
Pros
- Has a free plan
- Has numerous integrations
- Loaded with plugins to let you modify projects
Cons
- Limits the assigning of project tasks to only one person
- Projects can get complex with the many features
Evernote
Evernote is known as a note taking app. It syncs across all devices to make your notes available on the go, everywhere you go, and has additional features for organizing, archiving and listing tasks.
With Evernote, your team can easily capture ideas on research and interviews, draft blog posts and eBooks on the go as the ideas emerge, save articles to read later, annotate PDFs, record audio, and save texts, links, and images with ease.
Pros
- Unlimited space for storage
- Has a robust search engine
Cons
- Paid version is pricey
- It is prone to occasional bugs
Hightail
This is a cloud service for sharing large files and obtaining feedback, over a secure channel. The tool allows for digital signing of files and synchronizing them.
It is loaded with creative collaborative features to make everything easy and seamless, eliminating the need to share files through emails which allow for miscommunications to occur.
Pros
- Unlimited online file storage
- Easily sends large files of up to 10gd in size
- Great security features including identity verification
Cons
- Less interactive support team
- Files shared tend to expire quickly
Soda PDF
Sorry, we couldn’t resist. Soda PDF is the revolutionary, reliable, and intuitive portable online collaboration tool that allows your teams to quickly create secure PDF documents, save them to the cloud, sign and send, and share them with the whole team.
It’s perfect if you’re a document-heavy company managing a remote team or a connected network of knowledge workers.
Functions such as:
- Multi-step security
- Fast and intuitive professional document creation in seconds
- Customizable doc options
- Side-by-side view mode for lightning-quick comparisons
Are what make this the perfect tool for the modern knowledge sharing company.
Trello
Does your team have trouble identifying goals, parsing them out into manageable tasks, and tracking progress each step of the way? You aren’t alone.
That’s why Trello, the ultimate project management software available on the web, is trusted by teams everywhere to help them get the job done. Its unique system of project cards allows you to do everything from identifying the importance of a task to gauging progress within a project.
Did we mention it was FREE!
Bonus: Trello integrates with GitHub, Google Drive, and Slack.
Google Keep
Part of Google’s ever-expanding dominance of all things “the Internet”, Google Keep is their note-taking rival to Evernote and OneNote, and it has quickly become one of the best tools online.
Quickly take and save notes, photos, voice memos, and checklists, and share them with your team. With integration into Google’s suite of services, it’s impossible to beat the flexibility and convenience.
Yammer
The business social network, Yammer, is a veteran of the online collab scene:
- Like each other’s statuses
- Create your own ingroup with company emails
- Chat privately or in the open
- And share documents with ease
It’s all as easy as logging in and saying hello!
Yammer is the most widely used of all team collaboration tools, and it’s one of the best ways to increase employee bonding, collaboration, and morale.
Redbooth
Oh, your team doesn’t have Redbooth? It should! It’s one of the most comprehensive and in-depth project management tools on the market.
You can create projects, assign colleagues different tasks, track hours worked, and even view fancy Gantt charts and visualize productivity in stunning colours. The chat functions keep everyone on the same page and video and instant messaging allow for fast, effective communication.
GotoMeeting
Next collaboration software for businesses is GoTo Meeting. GoToMeeting also comes with dozens of useful tools, easy-to-use Web-conferencing solution, to get you started immediately.
What’s unique about GotoMeeting?
- Screen sharing, Web audio, a dial-in conference line, drawing tools and the ability to record meetings.
- With GTM your remote team has no need to go anywhere for meetings.
- HD-quality video is perfect for conducting webinars and hosting conferences.
Zoom
Zoom is a leading modern enterprise video communication software with a reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing. This video conferencing tool enables you to attend a meeting from your desktop, mobile device, or conference room.
What’s unique about Zoom
- Loaded with features like high definition sound and visual quality, voice detection, seamless screen sharing, group collaboration and much more
- applicable across various platforms such as Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Zoom Rooms, and H.323/SIP room systems
- Up to 100 interactive video participants can engage with an unlimited audience in live virtual events
Hiver
Hiver is an email collaboration platform that helps teams manage group inboxes like info@, sales@, and support@ right from Gmail. An extremely easy-to-use and intuitive solution, teams use Hiver to streamline their daily email workload, gain visibility into what everyone is doing, collaborate without hassle, and monitor performance.
What is unique about Hiver?
- Simplify email assignment: With Hiver, team leads and managers can assign emails as tasks in just a click, without having to forward these emails around.
- Track email status in real-time: Hiver enables team leads to stay on top of every email query, till the point of resolution. You can find out in real-time if an email is yet to be picked up, work in progress, or has been resolved.
- Collaborate internally via Email Notes: Team members get to collaborate, sync up, and run discussions via Email Notes that are attached to an email thread. You can, therefore, completely do away with sending internal emails that only add to inbox clutter.
- Automate repetitive tasks: By using Hiver’s automations, teams can create specific workflows that save them a ton of time and effort. For instance, any email with ‘invoice’ in the subject line can be automatically assigned to someone from the finance team.
Conclusion
Collaboration Tools are tools that allow team members to work together, discuss ideas, share files, schedules, or to-do list items. Important note: the collaboration tools offered by cloud computing (e.g., Google Drive , Microsoft Office 365, Webex , etc.) are based on allowing multiple people to edit the same document at the same time using web-based apps like Google Docs or Kingsoft Office (i.e., online document sharing for workgroups).