Connecting people into the organization across projects as well as people outside organization across geo’s is now made possible by the Collaboration Tools gone Social. Collaboration softwares are now allowing people to start a conversation within the tool. Getting quick feeds on particular projects are now made extremely easy with the social integration of collaboration tools.

The top collaboration tools such as OneDrive or SkyDrive, Google drive and Box are some of the most popular collaboration tools used by professionals for online data collection and sharing. SharePoint Online and Yammer are two basic integrations which are used by OneDrive to make communications across shared platform.

SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online is now organized into three distinct hubs- Newsfeed, OneDrive, and Sites. These hubs are available in global navigation bar and thus the social features associated with My Sites are fully integrated into the SharePoint experience. With this, you no longer need to specifically visit My Site in your web browser to access social features.

News Feed

With new ways to work with videos and rich media, you can post to a News feed on a team site shared with a selected group of people. SharePoint Online also allows tags in newsfeed posts enabling you to quickly view conversations that reference that tag. The features also allows to include pictures, videos, links, web URL’s as well as documents in your post.

Blogs

Blogs in SharePoint Online enables an organization to quickly share information among employees, partners or customers. You can add insight to a difficult subject area, provide guidance and inspiration or explain a new guideline or procedure.

Yammer

Yammer brings conversations to your OneDrive and SharePoint Online files. Yammer allows you to start conversations inside documents and this feature helps teams work better internally.

Google Drive

Google Drive also allows conversations right at the place of the document. Now you don’t have to use Gmail to discuss over the conversations and then back to the documents to make changes in the document. Google Drive provides facility to make changes in the document in real time while having conversations about a particular document. As you add collaborators to a particular document or file, you can click the chat button that appears to start a conversation to the right of what you are working on.

Google+

Google also built some handy Google drive tools into Google+, its social network. You can click on share button to share a document with your circles and get feedback.

Box

Another collaboration tool, i.e. Box has also incorporated Social features into its capabilities. Now Box allows you to create tasks and track their progress. Secondly, you can call for attention of a specific teammate using ubiquitous “@” symbol. Thirdly, you can now leave comments via email. Fourthly, the content can be edited online.

Box allows you to start a comment thread with a document shared online with a number of collaborators, rather than leaving another comment, you can create a task and assign it to someone. The comment thread can also be seen via email and responses can be sent.

The Bottom Line

Thus collaboration tools are now socially powered enabling teammates, partners and clients communicate efficiently.