For several decades now, email has been at the centre of corporate communications. But we’re now seeing a shift in the way people collaborate and communicate at work, led by a variety of new technologies and agile work practices.
While email’s functionality continues to be important for some communications, people are finding that the new collaboration technologies allow them to work more productively.
Sharing files and information with team members on different continents, recording and playing back video conferences to recall important information, providing training to people in distant locations, and simply reducing the volume of clutter in the inbox are all made possible by some of the platforms listed below.
In this guide, we’ll look at six collaboration technologies that are changing the way people work today.
1. Collokia
Pegged as a ‘collective intelligence tool’, Collokia works as a Google Chrome plug-in, and helps to improve productivity and collaboration in the workplace. When an employee searches Google, Collokia overlays the search results with feedback, ratings and annotations from other employees at your company.
The tool allows employees to benefit from the wisdom and shared knowledge of everyone else at their organisation from within a related Google search.
2. Slack
This online workplace communications platform offers a variety of features to help your employees stay connected. It has document sharing, messaging, video conferencing and search tools to help users collaborate seamlessly. Users can create their own channels and mention each other in specific messages, making it a great organisation platform too.
If you’ve used HipChat and Stride in the past, be aware that the partnership between Slack and Atlassian has resulted in the discontinuation of these two programs. Atlassian and Slack merged and purchased the IP for HipChat Cloud and Stride.
3. CommuniCloud
Video conferencing is changing the way people work, and CommuniCloud is leading the way. This professional collaboration tool allows you to meet face-to-face with remote teams, and offers flexible and secure HD video conferencing, allowing you to save time and money on travel and enjoy the benefits of increased contact with your team.
Use CommuniCloud for training, for webcasting or sales demonstrations. You can keep your team connected anytime and anywhere. You can customise layouts, dial out to bring on more team members and even create sub-conferences within a conference call. Your team will find many ways to use this versatile tool.
4. Podio
The Podio app allows you to see everything related to a project on one page. This encourages collaboration, improves communication and keeps everyone up-to-date in real-time. It works seamlessly with other popular platforms like Google Docs, OneNote and DropBox.
Instead of logging into five different systems every day, you can consolidate and store files, task management, mobile apps and workflows all in one handy online space.
5. LeanKit
Do you need help with project management? Lean Kit was designed to help teams of executives collaborate more efficiently, and it can do the same for you. This project management software runs on an intuitive graphic interface, and each task shows up as a virtual card in a kanban style. Each member of the team can see the cards on their screens as if they were laid out on a table.
This graphical interface makes it easy for each person to say how much progress has been made and what still needs to be done. It’s also easy to see who is responsible for which task, and you can use the program’s metrics to analyse the project’s workflow.
6. Google Drive
No list of collaboration platforms would be complete without one of the most popular resources businesses use today. The Google suite, including Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and many more, allows multiple team members to collaborate on work at the same time, create shareable links to the work and manage privacy controls.
