What are Collaboration Tools?
The goal of collaboration software is to improve the efficiency of team efforts by offering a single location where all team members may freely exchange ideas, information, and files when working together on tasks and projects. Using Project Collaboration Software, employees can work from any location via the cloud, which boosts productivity, efficiency, and, ultimately, the bottom line. Effective collaboration is the cornerstone of every successful team. With workplaces and employees spread across the globe, setting up a system that connects everyone across your workplace is essential.
Importance of Collaboration Platform
The collaboration platform enables teams to:
- Generate and refine ideas for projects
- Collaborate on those projects
- Share knowledge and data from a single, trusted source
- Communicate effectively across teams, departments, stakeholders, managers, and clients
- Gain access to data and reports to facilitate decision-making
These tools and platforms facilitate work collaboration and help project managers manage changes, communicate, and save time. These tools also allow several people to work on the same task and enable professionals to be more effective in their daily tasks while creating a more transparent communication channel.
How does collaboration software work?
Collaboration software might work differently depending on the tool, but most have some features (as mentioned below) that tie them together to maximize team efficiency.
- Tag-based messaging & updates
- Document sharing capabilities
- Project planning & tracking tool
- Reporting & dashboards
- Document management
- Document collaboration
- Shared calendars
- Task management
- Surveys
- Online forums
As mentioned above, the capabilities of collaboration software are extensive. However, you must be aware of your options to make an informed decision about which software is best suited for your needs. Let’s explore some of the best online collaboration tools available.
Best Online Collaboration Tools:
Asana
One of the most well-known project management and work collaboration software, Asana, allows users to assign tasks to other members, add followers to projects, and monitor deadlines. It’s beneficial as a to-do list or calendar for strategic planning. Using Asana, you can add someone as a task collaborator, providing them with updates on the task. Also, by adding someone as a project member, ‘Read more’ option will give them access to all tasks in the project.
Monday.com
Monday.com is a complete collaboration and work-oriented platform that helps teams manage projects and workflows with visual boards to keep track of tasks and monitor progress. Thanks to the intuitive environment, you can manage everything from one central dashboard and get up and running quickly. Monday.com lets you assign ownership for tasks. Everyone knows what everyone else is working on, preventing miscommunication and duplication. Your coworkers can see a personalized view of their weekly assignments. Team leaders can also easily see what each team member is doing and who is overloaded with work or underutilized.
Find out if Monday.com fits your business needs
Trello
Trello is a Kanban application that helps teams visualize workflows. Trello team collaboration features are powerful, and the main benefit for remote teams using Trello is having all tasks organized in one central place. The platform allows you to work with boards or lists, and the organization is highly customizable. Within these, you can set up to-do lists and delegate work amongst colleagues. There’s also the option to assign comments to cards – a quick way to give feedback to others.
Get more information about Trello
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a work and collaboration tool designed around spreadsheets. Smartsheet allows you to import spreadsheets or create one from scratch and visualize it in whatever manner you want: card, Gantt, calendar, or grid. It has powerful automation capabilities. Smartsheet Collaboration tool allows teams to participate in content collaboration and commenting, including polls. It also enables project managers to perform resource and project management using its powerful project management and collaboration capabilities.
Discover more Smartsheet capabilities
Microsoft Planner
Microsoft Planner, part of the Microsoft 365 platform, is a task management software equipped with Kanban boards and to-do lists. Microsoft Planner’s Kanban boards can help project managers and their teams make plans and assign tasks. It’s chat feature fosters collaboration as well as basic task-tracking charts that show progress. A few of Microsoft Planner features include:
- Kanban boards
- To-do lists
- Schedule view
- Group and filter tasks
- Collaborative task management
- Ability to assign a task to several team members
- Ability to give users access to the tool
- Importation of Microsoft Planner into Outlook
- Email notifications
Project for the Web
Project for the web is Microsoft’s most recent cloud-based work and project management offering. It provides simple yet powerful work management capabilities and can be used by project managers and team members to plan and manage work of any size. It allows you to collaborate with others when developing a project plan, and any member of an Office 365 group assigned to a project can participate in the planning process. This delegation not only simplifies planning but also allows for true collaboration across a team when building a schedule to ensure that it works for everyone involved.
Learn more about project management with Project for the Web
Microsoft Dynamics Project Operations
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams in a single application to win more deals, accelerate project delivery, and maximize profitability. Using this tool, team members can improve productivity, collaboration, and visibility with integration to Microsoft Teams and submit time and expenses from anywhere.
Find out What is Dynamics Project Operations
Conclusion
There is a wide variety of collaboration tools that exist for teamwork. Make sure you make a well-informed choice by looking for a platform that lets you communicate in various ways: tag-based messaging, updates, creating, sharing, organizing documents, planning, tracking projects, accessing reports and data, and fully customizing your experience to fit your needs.
Find out how to automatically move all your project data to a new collaboration platform