12 Top, Free Ways to Collaborate Online
Applications that make it easy to share and collaborate are often of much more use to web workers than they are to standard office workers. Especially if you work online with colleagues at disparate locations, some of the best collaboration tools you can choose are free. In this post, I’ll round up several examples that you can count on.
Although it’s still technically a beta product, I’ve had no problems using FolderShare, a Microsoft Windows Live service, to share files and folders securely with colleagues. FolderShare was acquired by Microsoft and is a full-featured application. The best aspect of it is that it lets you and colleagues share files and folders on a cross-platform basis. I’ve used it extensively to keep Windows and Mac systems in synch.
Especially if you’re part of a virtual workgroup and need to keep everybody’s schedule firmed up, Google Calendar is the way to go. If you don’t yet use it, you can send out easy e-mail invitations for colleagues to share calendars with you, and Plaxo is good to look into if you want to synch your calendars with multiple other types of calendars.
It’s often very useful for web workers who share things to be able to control each other’s computers. See my post on numerous ways to do this for free.
Meetings—they never seem to go away. The good news is that online meetings can be much more efficient than real-world ones, especially if you can save some travel time. For online meetings, Yugma and Yuguu are good choices, as described here.
Recently, an online workgroup I’m in standardized on Gubb to share lists with each other. You can share to-do lists, notes on things you plan to post online, and much more. It’s easy to add and delete list items and quick to log in and log out. Gubb shoots for simplicity, not complexity.
Sharing online organizers can make a lot of sense for workroups. Consider Zoho Planner for this job. In addition to standard organizer features, you can upload images and files and get at them from anywhere.
Shared online capacity can become a big issue for collaborators. If you want a healthy amount of free online storage space, look into XDrive. It gives you 5GB of online storage, and if you need to move up, you can go to 50GB of shared storage for incremental extra costs.
Pictures can be worth a thousand words for online collaborators. For sharing videos online, I like Sightspeed for its ease of use and how I can just e-mail links to shared videos to others. For free online videoconferencing, check out ooVoo.
Finally, sometimes broadcasting a very simple message to your workgoup can be an efficient way to get everybody in synch. For this application, look into Pinger–a fast and easy way to get a message to lots of people in one shot. Pinger has also just added a service that lets you send an instant voice message to multiple people in over 20 countries at the cost of a local call.
Do you know of any good sharing and collaboration tools?
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Collaboration is all well and good, but it’s only useful if it drives an outcome. In other words, we can spend hours meeting and talking about a piece of work, but unless that piece of work gets done, surely the meetings et al have been a waste of time?
ActionThis has been designed to drive outcomes – to help people finish what they start. People can work together on a project, sharing documents, but they’re driven to complete the task – and everyone gets visibility of what’s happening.
And it works with the tools many of us use everyday, including Microsoft Outlook. Try it out now!
And I should have left the URL: http://www.actionthis.com.
You should not forget Basecamp & Co.
=> http://www.37signals.com/
How could you not include mebeam ?
For collaboration , it has no
equal.
impressive!
Need to schedule an event among a group of people? Try http://www.doodle.ch , can’t get any easier!
Elluminate vRoom is a free, three-person virtual meeting room with comprehensive collaboration features, including whiteboard, full-duplex audio, application/desktop sharing, high-resolution video, polling/quiz/survey, file transfer, web tour, foreign language translations, closed captioning, and more. Also multi-platform and supports low-bandwidth connections. Visit http://www.getvroom.com.
- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication
i find that this list may be very helpful. currently, i am only using plaxo and yugma from this group of tools. however, i see great potential for the others listed.
although a relatively new user of plaxo, i have been using yugma for quite some time. it’s been by far the easiest and most cost effective online meeting tool out there. highly recommended!
thanks for the other suggestions, too.
vRoom looks very interesting–especially combining whiteboarding with videoconferencing. Thanks Beth.
It seems XDrive is only available to U.S. residents…unless there’s something I’m missing on their sign-up page…
Vyew is a browser-based web conferencing, desktop sharing and collaboration platform that features always-on workspaces for real-time meetings and for meeting participants to access and collaborate on content anytime. You can upload anything digital into the workspace and there is no software installation required. http://www.vyew.com
Another great collaboration tool is http://www.jointcontact.com.. Their service includes an iCalendar feed, so you can sync Google Calendar, Outlook 2007 and Apple’s iCal to your task list.
You can also manage documents, images, contacts, discussion groups and team information.
There is also Yakkle.
Yakkle offers gmail and jabber users the ability to connect with multiple other users for 16 bit voice chat and real time desktop collaboration with remote mouse and keyboard control.
What is real neat about Yakkle is that allows collaboration sessions to be established as an outgrowth of IM chats rather than scheduled sessions. Also when collaborating in a group it also allows you to switch who is sharing their desktop dynamically, without having to establish a new presentation session. Best of all Yakkle is free to use in either peer-to-peer or group mode.
Well the post seems impressive seems like the author has not done a very good search on office suites. Even then i would like to add a few more office suites which allow you to collaborate seamlessly with your clients and have much more to offer office suites like eDeskOnline-Free Web operating system and Thinkfree they are productive and useful for all the purposes.
When thinking about OpenSource alternatives on your server, take a look at ProjectPier (at http://www.projectpier.org).
I also like Yugma (www.yugma.com) for free screensharing. It also plugs in very nicely with Skype, so that you have a nice real-time setup for (basically) free.
What timesheet service would you guy suggest? I need something clean, easy and possibly free since I don’t have budget for yet another service that in the eyes of my management could be or not be useful.
Any suggestion?
@Luca,
i’ve not used, but i hear very good things from tsheets: http://www.tsheets.com
hope it’s useful.
Jott is handy for blasting out a text message to a group of people. GoToMeeting is my favorite but it’s a little pricey compared to the free alternatives.
FolderShare indeed seems very nice. There are some big limitations, though, that aren’t that obvious at first.I wanted to use FolderShare to sync my Desktop PC’s ‘My Documents’ folder with my laptop, but there is a 10,000 file limit.Of course this won’t be a major limitation for most users, but for heavy users who want to have all their files synched, this is a big limitation.
Comapping is the first online mind mapping application made with keeping the limitations of a computer screen top of mind. It allows placement of mind maps, 2D charts and fishbone charts into Word/PDF/PowerPoint, HTML, Image documents. It often used both in the business process planning and education spheres.
10,000 files really isn’t that many if you’re using foldershare for work. Sure, I COULD synch multiple folders, but I’m more of a drop it all in one place kind of person. It’s still a great tool- just a shame they have the limit.
FMYI [for my innovation] is a collaboration site where you store and share information securely with your team. Everyone gets their own social networking-style profile page. People can create additional pages to post messages, files, links, tasks, events, and more for projects, contacts, resources or anything else you need to achieve your goals.
I’ve been using Officezilla (www.officezilla.com) with my students for several years now so they can collaborate on their student internship projects (simulating real-life project collaboration). Officezilla has the basics and it’s free. Great for non-profits, student teams, families, small businesses, etc. The setup is a bit cumbersome, but once you master it, this site rocks!