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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