By Joel Parkinson
What would the workplace be, without collaboration? Collaboration is a positive trait because it’s where people work together (even if they belong to different departments or divisions) towards achieving a common goal. Without effective business collaboration, companies would probably end up with a lot of in-fighting among co-workers, and deadlines wouldnât be met, and a lot of money, resources and time would be lost.
What are the tools used for effective collaboration during these high-tech times? Let’s list the top 10 business collaboration tools.
Skype
Skype has been around offices and manufacturing centers, as well as at home, for quite some time. Most use Skype on a daily basis, for both official work and leisure purposes. Skype has been hailed as a “great” collaboration too because it allows for team brainstorming, and it enables workers to check on their clients quickly, as well as provide time for relaxing chat-sessions, which can add sparkle to remote workers.
Yammer
Yammer is more than just your typical company social network site. Its feeds also provide workers and managers with a constant stream of ideas, articles and more. Yammer also encourages employees to think differently, without worrying about the distractions of the wider Internet. Yammer is a service which is best-known for promoting cross-departmental collaboration.
Projectmanager.com
Projectmanager.com was founded in 2008 by four people who wanted to develop a more innovative toolset for managing projects. Today, projectmanager.com has customers in over 100 countries, and is one of the fastest project management service provides on the Internet.
Google Docs
Google Docs has been around for a long time too, and yet it continues to provide a solid platform for all types of collaboration. It perhaps provides the simplest method for having multiple individuals work on one document, and keep things organized.
Teambox
Teambox is an innovative project management system that allows everyone to piggyback on other ideas, and discuss new project ideas in real time.
Facebook Member Pages
While closed groups on Facebook are nothing new, more office or work-related communities are now shifting towards a platform, where office or work-related requests are posted around the clock, and colleagues give and receive feedback across different time zones, any time, any week or month.
Basecamp
Basecamp is now considered as the world’s number one project management software. It offers to-do lists, Wiki-type web-based text documents, file-sharing, time-tracking and a messaging system. It’s also available in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Danish, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and English versions.
Status.net
Status.net allows users to do micro-blogging, file-sharing and groups via desktop or mobile applications. It also allows people to integrate their tools into their own domain, as well as integrate with other social networks.
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting offers more than just email or instant messaging. It allows office managers or supervisors and workers to distribute meeting invitations, audio-conference in VoIP, and even dial a toll-free number. It’s a very straightforward web-conferencing tool for small and medium-sized businesses.
Socialcast
Socialcast is a microblogging tool that fully integrates SharePoint, Outlook and others. The collaboration tool also provides a solid analytics suite, as part of its admin tools.
The new business collaboration tools are very helpful when it comes to providing a seamless, real-time and all-day, all-night system for communication, progress tracking, memo or document-sharing and much more.
