It’s important to be able to easily collaborate and communicate with your team if you want to be able to be successful in your projects, especially when you work from home during the pandemic.  Because the pandemic won’t be able to stop you from being productive. There are some online collaboration tools that you could use so that you would be able to easily work with other people and get feedback as soon and as fast as possible.

Collaboration and communication technologies are essential to business success, but what are they, and how do they work?

What Are Online Collaboration and Communication tools?

1. Almanac

If you are looking for a collaboration and communication tool to replace Microsoft Office and Google Docs, then Almanac is the perfect tool for you and your team. You get to have threaded commenting, custom fonts, real-time editing, Bi-directional links, and rich text formatting, and you get to have 15 plus integrations of dynamic embeds. 

With Almanac, you get to track each of the character changes made in the document, make connected versions of each document and edit them, compare versions against each other, and you would be able to merge all of these different versions together and manage them easily.

2. Zoom

With the start of the pandemic and everyone having to adjust and do everything online, Zoom had slowly risen upon the online collaboration and communication tool that people had been using since it could combine online meetings, chat, video conferencing, and it could all be used on mobile. 

It has high-quality audio, it’s clean, and you would be able to record your meetings so you could go back. You could even schedule the meeting beforehand, already complete with an awaiting video meeting link.

3. Microsoft teams

One of the biggest tools for collaboration and communication is Microsoft teams and Office 365. They have the cloud where you would be able to save and store all of these important documents that your team would be able to access, have word processing, spreadsheets, and slide-shows you could use, and multiple would be able to edit these documents at the same time. 

4. Slack

Slack is a messaging tool that video game developers usually use to help with service collaboration. You could easily use it as it has this messaging service that you would also be able to integrate other social media platforms like Dropbox and Twitter. 

With this tool, you would easily be able to organize the conversations by topic where you would be able to share any files, photos, and videos.

How Are Online Collaboration Tools Used?

1. Creatively collaborate

When you are looking for an online collaboration tool to help you creatively collaborate with your team, look for one that you would easily be able to upload files, documents, PNGs, JPGs, GIFs, and PDFs. 

Lucky for you, Invisionapp does exactly that. With this application, you would be able to manage your projects better by adding new pages, have a more solid workflow, collaborate in real-time, be more flexible, and easily share and browse all the files that different teams are working on.

2. Editing and creating documents

Especially during group collaborative work, you need a tool that would be able to help your edit while giving you options on the kind of styles and fonts you could use.

A perfect example of an online collaboration tool that could help you do this is Google Docs because it’s a free tool that you could use that would be able to save your documents on the cloud, be able to simplify the storage of the document per team, have these amazing and free templates that you could use, and multiple people would be able to access, edit, and comment on the document all at the same time.

3. Managing projects

There are some online collaboration tools that would help you manage the projects of your company, being able to inform you if you have already distributed the work efficiently, the progress of each member on their part of the project, and the calendar of each deadline.

When you are looking for a collaboration tool for project managing, you need to find a tool that has a group chat where you could communicate through, raise issues that would easily be solved, easily share files, documents, and information, notes that would be able to help your write content together, connects with the project through mobile, and have a calendar that you could use to see when the tasks are needed.

4. Online meeting and sharing documents

Get a collaborative tool that would also allow you to have your meetings online while being able to share documents and be able to edit these documents in real-time. It would allow you to upload, review, and share documents.

ShowDocument is an amazing collaborative tool that you could use because this would allow you to share an “online whiteboard”, share your documents online, be able to use a translator for your chat, have meetings online, co-edit documents, share your screen during your online meeting, and share your google maps.

5. Staying connected

Get a collaborative tool that would help you stay connected with your team that is easy to use and reliable so that you would be able to easily rely on any concerns and information that needs to be relied on even when you are in different parts of the world.

A well-known tool that you could use to stay connected is Skype. This is an app that you could use to call, instant message, send video messages, allow group calls, and you could even do one-on-one group calls.

What Are the Advantages of Using Collaboration Tools?

There are a lot of advantages and benefits when you choose to use collaboration tools for your company. 

With these collaboration tools, you would be able to boost the efficiency and the productivity of your office, be able to learn new things together as a team, solve problems that are complex and need collaboration easily, improve the communications between each of your employees, and generate ideas and solve plans much faster.