‘Work from home’ culture has its own set of challenges, especially for those who are exercising it for the first time and that too, at unexpectedly short notice such as the COVID-19 lockdown announcement. There are neither face-to-face team meetings nor you are surrounded by your colleagues for a quick clarification of any doubt. It’s also challenging to refer to a particular sentence or point in a document to put your thoughts across the team and it can be a bit overwhelming. However, the available range of collaboration tools can help you to ease out this anxiety.
Following are some of the popular collaboration tools with their features that can help your staff communicate and collaborate effectively and productively.
- Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a popular team communication and collaboration tool that offers one-on-one and group voice and video calling and messaging. It supports integration with around 250 apps and services including third-party apps. The free version allows unlimited chat messages and web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint while the paid version includes 1 TB of storage, voice and video meetings for up to 250 people with recording option and security features including single sign-on to all Microsoft 365 apps, enforced multi-factor authentication and advanced auditing and reporting. Besides real-time team communication, Microsoft Teams offers much more.- Features –
- Voice calls
- Video Meetings
- Messaging
- File Sharing
- Productivity apps and services
- Collaboration
- Slack
Similar to Microsoft Teams, Slack offers voice and video calls and chat. The free version allows access to 10,000 recent messages, one on one voice and video calls with teammates and 10 integrations with third-party apps. The paid version offers access to complete message history, group voice and video calls and collaboration with guests outside your organization.- Features –
- Voice calls
- Video Meetings
- Messaging
- File Sharing
- Productivity apps and services
- Collaboration
- Google Hangouts Meet
Similar to those of Slack and Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts meet offers video calling. It’s available for free for all Google users that facilitate anyone having a gmail.com or googlemail.com email address to schedule or start a meeting. Google Meet offers tight integration with Google Calendar and real-time captions. The free version of Meet supports 100 people per call. Yet, there are perks to go for the paid version. The free Google Meet version has a limitation on time which is 60 minutes for a meeting duration and a maximum of 100 members can attend the meeting as compared to 250 for the paid version. Also, with the free version, people with a Google account can attend the meeting while it doesn’t support call-in by phone.- Features –
- Voice calls
- Video Meetings
- Messaging
- File Sharing
- Collaboration
- Zoom
Zoom is one of the popular videoconferencing tools that is designed for remote teams, webinars, virtual business conferences and other corporate purposes. With Zoom, you can have one-to-one or group voice calls as well as video meetings. You can sign up for free and can host meetings with up to 100 participants. The only downside is that the meeting duration will be limited to 40 minutes. Paid plans offer longer meeting duration and cloud recording.- Features –
- Voice calls
- Video Meetings
- Webinars
- Messaging
- File Sharing
- Cisco WebEx
Cisco WebEx is similar to Zoom and its basic paid plan allows you to host a meeting for up to 50 members with meeting recording and file and screen sharing features. Advanced versions provide a greater number of participants per call, more cloud storage, 24/7 customer support and more host licenses.- Features –
- Voice calls
- Video Meetings
- Webinars
- File Sharing
- Collaboration
- GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is another popular videoconferencing and webinar tool for teams. GoToMeeting doesn’t offer a free version. With paid plans, around 150 members can participate in an unlimited number of meetings with no meeting duration restriction, HD video, screen sharing and dial-in conference line. Advanced versions facilitate more participants, co-organizers, unlimited cloud recording, transcription, note-taking and other features.- Features –
- Video Meetings
- Screen Sharing
- Webinars
(Note – Free version availability and pricing details as of May 8th, 2020 and subject to change in future)
Behind any successful project, there is an efficient team. Effective and seamless communication and collaboration is imperative for a team to perform to its optimum level. With the above communication and collaboration tools, you can get your team up to speed even while working remotely.
In this blog, we elaborated on some of the popular team collaboration tools while working from home. In our upcoming blog, we will also be discussing how to stay on top of task management for your team with some efficient and useful tools.
