When your business is still in the startup phase, collaboration is vital. You may be building a remote team of people around the globe. Or maybe you’re outsourcing some of your operations until your team’s large enough to take care of everything on its own.
Essential as collaboration is, you’re unlikely to have enough funding to pay for some of the more well-known collaboration tools out there.
Fortunately, there are an array of free collaborative tools out there that should more than meet your needs.
We’ve covered some of these previously in our article on collaborative tools that we find essential at Innoway.
There are, however, a few others worth knowing about.
Google Hangouts
If you regularly need to host video conferences, there’s no need to shell out for dedicated video-conferencing software.
No matter what the sales staff try and tell you, Google Hangouts should be plenty for your startup needs. Users can perform a group video chat with up to 10 users at a time and, if necessary, you can share your screen with other participants on the call.
Ditto for group chats, with Hangouts enabling you to instantly rope people into a chat, and share photos, videos, gifs, and your location (something that’s particularly handy for remote workers).
Skype
These days, it’s a bit unfashionable to admit that you use Skype as a collaborative tool. After all, it’s been around for so long that it feels as if you should be using something new and shiny instead.
That said, Skype still does its central tasks well. It’s pretty much as reliable as you’ll get when it comes to group video and chat and it should be remembered that it allowed people to engage in peer to peer document sharing a lot earlier than most did. It’s also ubiquitous and easy to use, making it less likely you’ll have to convince anyone to download it before you can have that all important meeting.
Asana
You don’t get much bigger than Asana in the world of project management software. Founded by ex- Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-engineer Justin Rosenstein, Asana came out of their own efforts at improving the productivity of Facebook employees.
The service has been around since 2008 and has a bevvy of high-profile clients include Airbnb, Dropbox, Disqus, Foursquare, and Pinterest.
That does not, however, mean it’s closed off to people in the startup space. In fact, teams of up to 15 people can use the free version.
Yammer
You might think Yammer is only used by enterprise-sized businesses, but the truth is it’s great for startups too.
The private social network allows employees access to conversations and business data as well as giving them the ability to upload videos, files, and photos.
Perhaps best of all is that you can carry on using the free, basic version of Yammer no matter how big your business grows.
Should you decide you want to own the Yammer network and have admin capability, you’ll end up paying US$3 a user.
Are there any free collaboration tools your startup depends on? Let us know about them in the comments section below.
