There is a good chance that you, like a large part of the Netherlands, are now obliged to work from home to quell that coronavirus. And then, unexpectedly, your skills to collaborate and communicate online are heavily demanded. Then you better have the very best (digital) tools at your disposal! We’re going to give you a hand with that, because here are the five best tools that you and your team can use to collaborate effectively in the cloud.
slack
Slack is probably the best-known service for working in teams. Companies do not only use it to be able to switch faster in the workplace, it is also an ideal program for communicating with home-based employees, freelancers and self-employed people. Different teams can via Slack exchange files, chat and work on documents.
Slack is free if you use it for small teams, don’t need two-factor authentication, and don’t need to make phone or video calls with multiple people. You can message team members or send messages to groups. You can give these groups (channels) a hashtag. Do you want to respond to someone directly in a group, then @’tje that person simply and he or she will receive a notification. The search function of Slack is especially strong, allowing you to quickly and efficiently find old messages and files.
With the free version you get 5 gigabytes of storage space at your disposal. With the paid versions you obviously have a lot more space available.
asana
Asana is very similar to Slack and also has a free version that you can use for teams of up to 15 members. You can create projects and all team members can immediately see the status of different steps of a project. In this we immediately see the great power of asana because it is primarily a project management tool. At a glance, everyone can see how far a particular project is, how many tasks have already been completed and how many are still open. So you don’t have to send e-mails to colleagues and ask for a new version of a report or document.
Team members can like other people’s posts or respond to status notifications, so you can even send an online . from Asana brainstorming session can start. The design is clear and because everyone has their own smart inbox, you get work done faster with Asana.
Workplace is a service of facebook† And that is precisely where Workplace’s biggest bottleneck is, because many people and companies have great difficulty entrusting Facebook with all their data. However, Facebook promises that Workplace is completely separate from your personal Facebook account and that the company has no access to your data.
The big advantage of Workspace is that it is very similar to Facebook, so many users will have no problem understanding the platform. You can adapt the corporate identity to that of your company to avoid confusion with normal Facebook.
The free version of Workplace is more than enough if you want to use it within a small team or organization. Here you also get 5 gigabytes of storage at your disposal.
Speakap is a Dutch product. This service is specifically aimed at companies, a free version for small teams is unfortunately not available. It is also not clear what a subscription costs, since you have to request a quote via the site. You can get one for free extensive demo of the service, can also be requested via the site.
The advantage of speakap is that you can put it all to your own hands. This means that you can apply your own corporate identity and you will not see the Speakap logo anywhere. You can also make apps available for both iOS and Android that bear the name of your own company.
Microsoft Teams
Teams is the biggest competitor to the popular Slack. And not surprising, because the two services are extremely similar in terms of functionality. Slack is still winning when it comes to collaboration between people who work on different systems, and the app has made significant further personalization. Teams has the advantage that it is from Microsoft, and therefore works seamlessly with programs such as Outlook, Word, Powerpoint and Excel.
With the free version of Teams, the user can send unlimited messages, share his screen and there is 2 gigabytes of storage available per person. However, the great strength of Teams is that it is part of Office 365, which means that many companies already have the full version of the tool in the software package. Which of course makes it a very attractive option for larger companies in terms of costs.
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