A Few of Our Favorite Things: Online Collaboration Tools Part 2

Last week I shared some of my favorite online collaboration tools for conversation facilitation and project management. Today we'll dig into tools for document management and design collaboration, and show a use case where you can see how many of these tools apply in an actual project.

Document Management Tools

Jing - Jing is a powerfully useful tool for sharing screen shots and short videos produced on your desktop. It’s one of the best tools to use for creating training videos or short demonstrations in a very quick and easy manner. Uploaded videos are shared via Screencast.com. Jing is a free product from TechSmith.

Google Accounts - Google services such as Drive, Hangouts, Google+, Voice, and Calendar make for a very compelling selection of tools for companies of any size. Some have even adopted Google services as their primary suite of office tools in place of MS Office or OpenOffice. Some aspects of the service however do require that all parties have a Google account of some sort in order to participate. Google Hangouts, the video chat service, can only be used by logged in Google account users. All services are free from Google.

Box - A new contender on the scene, Box (not to be confused with DropBox) is also a cloud-based document storage and sharing service. With Box, you can get 10GB of free storage with a personal account. Paid accounts (Business and Enterprise editions) offer more project collaboration tools and integration with outside platforms. See features and pricing information here. DropBox is a similar service which yields 2GB of free storage and paid accounts for more.

TitanPad - TitanPad’s success is its simplicity. You can very easily create a virtual notepad on the web and share its unique URL to quickly begin collaborating or conversing. Some may remember its earlier incarnation as EtherPad. You can also upload existing documents for sharing via the tool. TitanPad is totally free to use.

Design Collaboration

Balsamiq - Balsamiq is a uniquely powerful website wireframe mockup creator. Drag-and-drop common web template elements such as a navigation bar, text boxes, links, buttons, and forms to quickly create a conceptual web layout. Graphic design elements are left out on purpose so collaborators can focus on functionality. Balsamiq mockups can be shared online via their myBalsamiq service. A single user license costs $79 and volume pricing is available.

Cacoo - Cacoo is an online diagram collaboration tool. Like Balsamiq, you can create website wireframes but you can also diagram many other kinds of information like flowcharts, mind maps, database relationship diagrams, even office layout plans. Users of Visio and PowerPoint will see some similarities here. Cacoo offers a free account with limited functionality. Fully features plans are available to one user for $4.95 per month or Team editions starting at $24.50 per month.

Enterprise Platform Solutions

In addition to the tools listed above, there are a number of Enterprise-level platform suites available which can do many functions all at once. Common examples include: Cisco WebEx Social, Podio, Rebooth, and Microsoft’s newly unveiled Office 365 which includes their long-standing collaboration tool SharePoint. Some of these are free, very low cost or on the more expensive end. You should assess the overall IT infrastructure needs of your organization before adopting one of these platforms as they may cross over with systems you already have in place.

Use Case Example

It may help to examine a scenario in which several of the above tools are brought to bear in order to see where each of their strengths lie. It’s not very common that an organization will use only one of the tools listed above. Instead it’s much more common to see many of them used in conjunction with one another.

Here’s the scenario: You’re working with a web design firm to help redesign your website. You have most of your staff on site but two or three important stakeholders are remote staff. Let’s see how the tools listed in this blog post can support this process.

You start by getting everyone on Skype together so that quick questions can get quick answers and won’t compete with email messages. You begin work and one of the first things your consultant wants are your existing design assets and brand guidelines. You decide to set up Basecamp as a place to store files and track to-dos as you go. As the web designers get going, you also need to think about your website navigation and information architecture. In order to start iterating on ideas with staff, you decide to use Balsamiq which is purpose built for wireframing potential page layouts. You get going on the myBalsamiq cloud hosting so that designs can easily be shared with everyone. Now the time comes for some design meetings. Because your staff are not all at the same location, you use GoTo Meeting to be able to conference everyone together including the web consultants. Things are going great but you’re generating a lot of large files with uncompressed images and other assets that you need to manage. Basecamp has been great but the storage limits are starting to become a problem. You then decide to start using Box to store all your design files because you get 1000 GB of storage for a modest amount of money. It’s easy to lock access to certain files and quickly search to find what you’re looking for. You’re approaching the launch of the new website but need to document some important features for your staff to reference. You get a Jing account so that you can create a series of short how-to videos and store them on Screencast.com for future use. After site launch you realize that you need to clearly document your publishing workflow and other key processes. You go get a Cacoo account to build some process maps and share them out to your staff.

The above scenario certainly isn’t the only way to accomplish these tasks but it’s a good real-world example to get your creative juices flowing. What mix of tools does your organization need to succeed?

Learn about how your organization can leverage Salesforce Communities (and how it's different from portals) in our free webinar 5/1 with CRM Consultant Angela Mahoney and Salesforce Account Executive Maurice Wasserman. Register here.