Top 10 Collaboration Tools for Small and Medium Businesses

ToOLOwl December 29, 2015 Top 10 Express yourself… owl is listening 3,274 Views

A Collaboration tool as the name suggests is something that allows you to accomplish a task in a shared manner. Collaboration tools play an important role in the success of your business, no matter whether your business is small, medium or large. Some tools serve the purpose of designers by bringing them on the same page, some are mere merging platforms with tools to simplify annotations, and some are more feature-oriented with a tinge of project management.

A collaboration tool is all about working together to resolve an issue or to create a new product altogether. By using this tool, you can stay connected with your team from any part of the world, thereby allowing you to work on the same project in a distributed group.

The tool handles the general project management activities. It simplifies resource management by bringing a team on one platform and helps to resolve major issues by polling and discussions. These tools are not often easy to choose because of the wide range of features they provide. So, in order to minimize your time and help you choose the best available tools we have come up with a list of Top 10 collaboration tools.

Key capabilities to look for in Business Intelligence tool

Communication: Facilitates communication through text, video and voice.
Remote and local presentation: Allow to present the results to internal teams, client or even to public.
Shared Access: There should be a common storage space for project files which must be able to keep multiple versions of the same document.
Co-Creation: It allows team members to interact directly to achieve the desired functionality in the project. It supports functionality such as mapping, whiteboards etc.
Consensus building: It filters and refine the proposed solutions and gives functionality like question management, polling etc.
Cost efficiency: Ensure that all the features required and add-ons has been included in the chosen package/license.
Hosting: Desktop, client-server or cloud-based, which version would be most suitable to your business.
Ease of use: The ease with which all the features of the tool can be understood.
Mobile accessibility: If the tool would be accessible for your mobile devices and provide mobile applications too.

Product	Details
	One Place For Everything: One Drive is a cloud-based platform that allows you to create, edit, share and review the documents along with videos and photos with other team members in real time. It ensures everyone to work on the current version of the document and view or restore older versions as needed.
	Speed up collaborative processes and share files securely: Box is an easy way to collaborate, share and manage your highly secured information. It manages security while working with your team, partners and customers so you can focus on more important tasks.
	A Safe place For All Your Files: Google Drive is a cloud-based storage platform that lets you store photos, stories, drawings, audio, videos and literally anything. You can quickly share your documents and can easily access them from any device.
	Store, take and send your files from anywhere: Dropbox is free file sharing and storage server that allows you to sync your files from anywhere, on any device. Team members can add, edit, erase, access and can share the file with anyone.
	Store, share and collaborate with ease and peace of mind: Ftopia is a cloud-based sharing service for experts. It enables you and your team to store, share and collaborate on documents with everyone regardless of the location with ease.
	Industrial-strength file sharing made for your industry: ShareFile is powered by Citrix which provides adaptable and synchronous file storage. It allows you to collaborate on projects with shared access, view, modify and retrieval rights on all modes of files.
	You’ve got a new place to work: iCloud is a collaboration tool that allows multiple users to edit the documents and spreadsheets in real time. It lets you share calendars, photos, videos, locations and more with family and friends.
	Reinvent your teamwork: Wimi is a tool designed for productive collaboration with teams, clients, and partners via dedicated workspaces. It helps you to securely share and sync the documents, calendar and tasks from anywhere anytime. Wimi provides communication tools along with screen sharing.
	Collaboration for all creative types: Hightail provides the creative collaboration where you can share files, get and review the feedbacks. It takes the projects from ideation to complete via several processes of iterations and feedbacks.
	Business File Sharing & Synchronization: Nomadesk is a SaaS company that focuses on file sharing and synchronization technology. It allows you and your team to sync, secure, share and backup data with the same behavior as whether you are working online or offline.