Research group collaboration tools

And the quality of that communication, studies show, is far more valuable than the quantity. Unfortunately, team collaboration often goes poorly. This is especially likely if team members:. Not only will everyone be happier if they work together well, but research shows that companies who promote collaboration are five times more likely to be high-performing.

These days, there are all kinds of online collaboration tools to help your team communicate well and stay in sync. The right tools for you are out there. It all depends on your business needs. Here are a few tools that can help. Luckily, there are project management tools out there to help effectively manage all the bits and pieces.

Example: An event planning company is putting together a major party. Instead of having to dig through numerous emails and ping all the various contractors, the project lead can use a central platform to create timelines, assign tasks, measure costs, and produce visual representations of the overall status of each moving part. Asking team members to log in to a central virtual location to check off their task or give feedback of some kind keeps everything running smoothly and quickly.

Video conferencing is a way to get all the research-based benefits of meeting face-to-face without the expense and hassle of planning something in person.

Example: A software development firm has several sizable projects to discuss, but the team members are in three different offices across the country. Rather than create long email chains or launch a conference call, both of which are easy to tune out, the team can get together in a virtual room. Namely, seeing your colleagues face-to-face increases engagement and productivity.

With video conferencing, you can also share data, documents and presentations with team members in real-time. Millions of people are using Slack to bring their teams together and drive their business forward.

Mockplus is the one-stop product design platform that allows product teams to create a website or mobile app projects online smoothly from wireframing to design handoff. It can also be used as a powerful project management tool to manage projects and design tasks in a breeze. For product teams that need to make all projects under control can enjoy many great management features:.

As a powerful online design tool , you and your team can enjoy many design features like:. The better collaboration will result in better designs. Viewflux is a tool designed for small businesses and remote workers , allowing you to see all of your projects in one place. You can now communicate with your clients visually and get visual feedback so that all stakeholders are on the same page throughout the design process. You can sync your designs from Dropbox and do the changes.

Canva is a simple graphic design tool to make visual content look decent. You can make unique designs in just a few minutes and share it with your team. Collaborating with teams is much easier with canva.

Designers can share their designs with anyone and other team members can leave their comments. Pick from thousands of layouts for your designs and also create your custom template. Sketch app aims mainly professionals in web designs as it has become a complete tool for UX design deliverables. It takes the pain out of working with repeated design elements so that designers can design once and use it anywhere.

You can find some nested symbols in Sketch to create flexible design elements with ease. Adobe XD is designed for both Mac and windows and is a part of creative cloud. Designers can connect it with their favorite tools like Dropbox, Avocode and others. This collaboration tool allows designers to switch from static layouts to interactive prototype in single click.

InVision is a comprehensive prototyping software and very useful collaboration software for designing user interfaces for mobile applications and digital interactive products.

The tool allows users to collaborate, upload wireframes, designs, gather feedback seamlessly and test much more effectively and efficiently. With InVision, you can manage your projects from a single dashboard and seamlessly navigate the entire design process in one place. The clients can provide instant feedback in the form of comments.

ONE by TemplateMonster is a valuable subscription service that provides users with a multitude of high-quality products and web-design tools. When you become a part of this service, you get access to a bunch of ready-made solutions — from themes designed for popular CMS to HTML templates, various extensions, and graphics.

As you can understand, everything you need for your next online-project is already waiting for you. Each of them can be downloaded freely and used without any limitations. By the way, it is possible to effectively cut your time you could spend on mastering your websites using extra services provided by the team. Skype is an instant messaging and calling app and is one of the popular project collaboration tools.

It allows audio and video calls between multiple devices like one on the laptop and the other on phone. Bring your teams together through group video calls and give great presentation online with the help of screen sharing.

You can make free or low-cost calls locally or internationally. Google has been making progress in the field of collaboration. Hangouts is a collaboration tool for business communication that offers voice and video calling to users. With Hangout chat you can create chat rooms to quickly chat and share files with team members. The team can communicate by direct messaging and be connected always. Next collaboration software for businesses is GoTo Meeting.

GoToMeeting also comes with dozens of useful tools, easy-to-use Web-conferencing solution, to get you started immediately.

WebEx is for businesses that rely heavily on meetings that need a full-featured communications software solution. It offers much secure team workspaces in the cloud. With WebEx, businesses can streamline their businesses and help solve real human problems. Stay connected anywhere with Join. You will completely get value for the money you are investing in this collaboration tool. Zoom is a leading modern enterprise video communication software with a reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing.

This video conferencing tool enables you to attend a meeting from your desktop, mobile device, or conference room. Also Read: Best Zoom Alternatives.

ClickMeeting is a browser-based web conferencing tool that comes along with dynamic features. It is mainly used to make webinars more effective and online meetings more collaborative. You can connect seamlessly with others regardless of location and operating system. Overall, ClickMeeting is a perfect tool that fosters effective communication and collaboration. Bit is a smart all-in-one document collaboration platform for teams to create interactive documents, manage digital content and track document insights.

In this documentation software, team members can invite colleagues accordingly depending on who they need to collaborate with to get work done. Google docs is another simple way of collaborating with a small or big team. You can easily share, edit, and eventually, publish documents of all kinds, make spreadsheets and presentations. Everything here is for free and easy to use. And once you have set the offline mode on your Google docs, you will not need an internet connection to use the docs. However, all the features are not available for free but it is quite in the budget.

The basic documentation and editing tools are available on the free version and will suit your needs just fine. Save documents, presentations, communicate, collaborate and get great work done. The key to success of any project is how good is the process of documentation. GitHub is built for teams to work together through problems, and learn from each other along the way. On GitHub you can manage your chaos along with writing code.

You can also do longer documentation for wikis on GitHub to present an in-depth information about your project. Toggl is one of the best collaboration tool with a no-hassle time tracking software. You can better take control of your time, boost productivity and increase revenue with Toggl.

Your employees can track working hours online, quickly, simply and reliably. TimeCamp is equipped with quite a considerable amount of features. It has timesheet integration to track and bill time spent on projects.

Teams all over the world can easily track without the headache of timesheets. Timely is an automation time tracking tool and best collaboration tool that is of great value for individuals in project development.

With Timely, your schedule is your timer. Timely is beautifully designed to lay out your scheduled activity next to your actual activity. Harvest is a web-based time-tracking tool that harnesses the power of time-tracking and online collaboration in the most effective manner. It is a robust and easy-to-use time tracking application that easily integrates with iOS, Android, and even Apple Watch.

It also supports a resource planning tool that helps you schedule future projects and assign team members based on capacity. ClickTime is one of those time tracking tools that will be particularly helpful for programmers, engineers, and professionals working in IT department.

With timesheets in ClickTime, you can increase project visibility, reduce costs, and stay on projects. They also help you reveal new insights, understand patterns, employee performance — all from a simple timesheet! With so many distractions around, RescueTime helps you to prioritize your work so you can focus and be more productive. It is a personal analytics service that shows you how you spend your time and provides tools to help you be more productive.

Dropbox is a simple and powerful way to keep your team on sync. Its business version allows more space 1 terabyte, or enough to store movies and more features and higher sharing limits. You can sync your Dropbox content to ProofHub for managing tasks and projects. Send files and folders and keep your work safe in Dropbox.

With OneDrive your team can share can store photos, documents, videos and all file type. You can store, sync and access your files anytime, anywhere on the web.

OneDrive, an online collaboration platform allows you and your colleagues to collaborate with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote from your desktop, mobile device, and the web. Together, these two software dimensions define how a tool or technology can be used — that is, at what time, in what place and by how many people. All communication, conferencing or coordination software will either be synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous collaboration programs work in real-time, meaning two or more people are communicating, reviewing and collaborating on the same platform at once.

You can expect to receive an answer or hear a solution to a particular question, prompt or task almost as soon as you relay it. Some examples of synchronous collaborative software in the office today include instant messaging, chat forums, VoIP calling and digital whiteboard applications, to name a few.

Like most technology, real-time collaboration has benefits and drawbacks:. Unlike the immediate interactions that define real-time software, asynchronous platforms are not designed for instantaneous tasks or activities.

Asynchronous collaborative software examples include email, group calendars, document sharing and some enterprise resource management systems. They include pros and cons depending on the needs of the collaborators:. How that software is set up, and subsequently how approved users can log in and use it, is part of a broader IT concern called hosting. Collaboration tools can also be classified according to what tasks or activities they help manage.

Certain business functions are essential no matter what industry or niche your organization falls under. The near-universal demand for assistance in these domains means many pieces of software with a particular focus or function. Some of the more prominent domains-focused software includes:. Video conferencing, screen sharing, employee scheduling, project managing, spreadsheet programming — the list of collaborative enterprise software is long and diverse yet often classified by their primary functions.

Ever been forced to manually, line by line, match two different versions of a document? Three versions? Even more?