In college, group project assignments can make you groan weeks in advance. They often play out just as you might imagine, too: one or two people do all the work, there are a couple of slackers who contribute almost nothing, and there’s often at least one ghost, that person whose name you know but have never seen in person. And while you might question why professors keep tormenting you with the assignments, you can rest assured knowing that your professional life will be full of them.
But team projects are a different beast in the workplace, and even though you might have to persevere through some awful group dynamics all the same, there are often more important things to worry about.
One of the most frequently overlooked workplace assets is a productive office collaboration toolset. Sometimes the best collaboration tools are the most obvious: simple to-do lists, group email, a workflow chart. But oftentimes you’ll encounter a need for something more sophisticated and tailored, whether it’s a robust video conferencing app or a specific file-sharing suite.
Check out our list of five office collaboration tools below, and hit up Forbes for an even more extensive list here.
Google Drive
Sometimes the best solutions are ubiquitous, and in the case of Google Drive, this is definitely the case. Like many of Google’s biggest successes, Drive is intuitive and simple, and for many of us, it’s hard to imagine our daily life without it. At its most basic level Drive is a file sharing system that makes use of Google’s core office-suite, which consists of Docs, Sheets, and Slides (kinda like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint for all you Windows sticklers.) The best part? Everyone uses Drive at some point, so it should be familiar. Still, sometimes you need a bit more oomph and functionality.
Wimi
Like Google Drive, Wimi is an all-in-one service with its own internal set of applications. Unlike Drive, Wimi is specifically advertised as a productivity-boosting teamwork tool. The big draw here is a clean interface for project management and all the usual collaborative tools like file sharing and synchronization. Some reviews complain about the lack of Gannt charts—a common requirement for many organizations—though a low baseline price should ease the pain.
Podio
Podio tries to outdo similar office collaboration and project management tools with a weird added bonus: a social network. In fact, Podio is kind of like a social network with a project management suite built atop, according to PC Mag reviewer Jill Duffy. In our Twitter and Facebook-driven worlds, this is actually a great approach, and in the case of Podio, it opens up coworker relationships and responsibilities to a new level of transparency.
Bitrix24
Bitrix24 sacrifices approachability with an almost unbelievable number of functions. For that reason it’s probably not the best first choice for a small team or business, but considering how robust its all-in-one approach is, Bitrix24 might actually be the ultimate choice for a complex business network. Like almost all team collaboration tools, you can get a free month of Bitrix24 to start, but the price jumps to $99 a month for an unlimited number of users after that. So what does it do? Bitrix24’s main draw is actually as a customer relationship manager (CRM), but it will also provide all the inter-coworker communication services you could think of.
dapulse
PC Mag’s review of dapulse says it all: the tool is gorgeous but underpowered. That might scare away the neediest companies, but for a small business owner the approachability might make up for the lack of features. As a task manager dapulse is easy to follow and keep up with, but it apparently lacks the juice to interconnect larger projects.
Whatever tool or application you choose, make sure you take advantage of free trial periods. Sometimes it can take a month or two just making sense of the tool, and there’s no reason to pay out if you don’t need to.
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