With a plethora of collaboration apps available (and many of them free), there have never been so many great and easy ways for your team to work together and have a higher level of transparency and organization. Here are the qualities of some of the very best, and if you’re team doesn’t collaborate with any of these, they’re all easy to sample and many work very well in tandem.
Evernote Business
If you’re unfamiliar with Evernote, it’s essentially a cloud-based, digital notebook that allows real-time sharing. Evernote Business comes with some extra tools that help distant departments open up and work more closely together, and it’s very easy to collate and study customer feedback. A subscription also comes with personal Evernote Premium accounts which vastly increase the amount of data you can upload to the cloud per month, allowing you and your team to take advantage of photos, audio, video, and any number of PDF’s or other standard documents.
Google Apps
This comes with access to all of Google’s cloud-based software that competes with more traditional Microsoft or Apple products: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It’s only $5 per employee, and gives both standard office software tools with great cloud support for real-time collaboration. Google Hangouts is a favorite for remote teams.
Skitch
This is an extension of Evernote that allows you and your team to mark documents with digital shapes, markers, and highlighters. This is especially great for planning logistics, or if you work in a visual field.
Dropbox
This is a standard for file sharing. You might be able to get by with the few free gigabytes available, but a monthly subscription gives you a ton of space to work with.
Flow
Ever feel horrified when you’re just beginning to plan a large group project? Flow is unique among collaboration apps in that it’s only function is to simplify information and present it in a clean fashion, so you just worry about taking one step at a time. If you’re team doesn’t want to use it, you can just send them emails from the app.
Dynamics Business Analyzer
This is Microsoft’s free software that helps you organize and view data in the most personalized, helpful format. It offers real-time collaboration, so you’re whole team can simultaneously edit and manipulate data.
Salesforce
This also holds a unique spot among this list of collaboration apps. It is a centralized hub that allows you to control all of your social media marketing campaigns, and it even automatically gathers data and runs ads where they tend to perform the best.