Collaboration Tools

There are a lot of different ways to collaborate with your project team and as a project manager, it’s important to know which ones are able to provide the type of collaboration you want your team to be involved in. There are a lot of options and they are listed below. These different options enable your team to do different things.

Group Communication – interaction between 3 or more people. Usually small groups are from 3-20 people and large groups could contain as many as 3,000 people.

Private Social Networking Platforms – Social networking platforms are popular these days and enable a group of people to act as a community online. Private platforms enable groups to do this without anybody else having access to their information.

Document Sharing – Creating and sharing work online and being able to access these documents elsewhere and enabling others to access the same documents either to view or also to modify.

File Sharing –  The same thing as document sharing but with files.

Workgrouping and Team Collaboration Workspace – A virtual workspace that’s online and enables team members to work together as a group. It’s basically a workgroup collaborative environment.

Web Presenting – Presentations that are placed online and watched by people elsewhere. This is using technology to deliver your presentation, powerpoint or other types of visual presentation to your audience that’s internet-based.

Whiteboarding – When you place files on a whiteboard that’s online. This usually refers to an online white board and is to be used the same way as a traditional white board.

Co-Browsing – The same thing as web-browsing but you are doing it with other people too not just yourself. Usually this occurs when two or more people access the same website at once.

Large-Audience Webinars (100+) – Webinars are web conferencing that enables live meetings, trainings, and presentations via the internet. When this occurs, people receiving training and so forth are at the computer and the presenter is presenting via the internet.  These softwares enable you to present to more than 100 people at once.

Clearly there are many other ways you could collaborate with your team online and they are the following:

Virtual 3-D Immersive Collaboration, Web-conferencing, Screen-Sharing, VoIP – Audio Conferencing, Instant Messenging, Video Conferencing, Chat, Event-Scheduling, Project Management, Collaborative Writing, Collaborative Visual Reviewing, and Mind Mapping and Diagramming

While these are other ways to interact with others online, there are limitless ways to communicate with your peers at work, it’s up to you to find the best way to work with others and figure out the most useful way to complete a project.

For a list of options for each of these different Collaborative tools online go to Best Online Collaboration Tools.