Productivity Tools To Increase Collaboration Online

In an increasingly online work, and play, environment having the right tools to work well together and easily is becoming more and more important. Gone are the days when sending emails back and forth endlessly will do the trick and if you’re still stuck in that rut you need to change your habits soon!

With a plethora of tools available for all online activities the productivity sector has seen a lot of growth over the past couple of years with a large variety of desktop and mobile applications that allow for great collaboration between individuals, teams, and groups.

To start with, here’s a few smaller apps that might help you with communication and organization:

At first glance Twoodo looks like some sort of corporate Twitter, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The platform uses hashtags to automatically sort messages into different projects and categories, allowing you to make a post in seconds, without having to sort through menus to find the right section. Twoodo also allows you to create different teams, controlling who sees which messages.

With its simple, Twitter-like interface, Twoodo’s main selling point is ease of use. Someone completely unfamiliar with the platform can figure it out in a matter of minutes. That allows your team to get up and running right away, without the hassle of trying to sort out a complicated program.

If you’re in need of a more visual collaboration platform, Murally might work for you. Where Twoodo is reminiscent of a social networking site, Murally calls to mind a bulletin board. Murally’s main feature is a virtual canvas that allows you to place images, videos and sticky notes. Notes can contain text, drawings or both, allowing you to convey ideas that would be difficult to get across through words alone.

For more structured projects, Kanbanize may be the way to go. It organises tasks and milestones using cards, making it easy to see the progress of the project at a glance. Cards can be organized into custom-created categories. You can also select different colors for an easy visual reference. Cards can be filtered in a number of ways, including color, priority and keyword.

If you and your team are always on the move, Moxtra could be the right choice. Although there is a desktop version, Moxtra was designed to work best on mobile devices. It has a variety of features to make it easy to collaborate without sitting at a desk. Moxtra’s suite of communication tools includes text and voice chat, as well as the ability to create clips to share with other team members. A clip records your voice as well as what’s on the screen of your device, allowing you more effectively explain an idea or procedure. 4 productivity tools to improve virtual collaboration – Memeburn

That is a solid start for anyone wanting to get started with some online tools that will help them, and their group, to start working together in a smoother way. That said, if you haven’t heard of some of the basic tools, then you really owe it to yourself to check these out ASAP as they are standards in the online world:

• Evernote – now includes collaboration and group chat features
• Trello – uses a “card” layout that makes organization and division of tasks simple and intuitive. Great for solo or groups.
• Email categories – most major email providers allow you to do some sort of catorgorizing with labels and folders; make the most of these with nested folders and rules so that you can have your inbox sorted for you.

Part of finding the “perfect” tools for online work as a group is trying them out. Not every group will want the same features or enjoy the same workflow – testing a few out quickly is generally the best way to find out what will work best. Even if the entire group cannot use the application, you can try out these applications for a couple of hours and see how they work before choosing the one that will work best for your needs.