Best suggestions for Team Communication & Collaboration Tools
November 13, 2013 1:33 PM Subscribe
We are a team of about 25 spread across two main locations with a single person in a third locale. We also use some outsourced resources now and again. We use a mish mash of tools to do everything from email (some of us use Outlook, others use Gmail with a forward, others use webmail/Zimbra, some use MacMail, etc.) to file sharing, chat and video conferencing. We need to get our act together and select the right tools. Help!
In my ideal world I would be able to find a single product/service that allows our team to:
- Email (We love the idea of using Gmail for Business if for no other reason than the search, but some of us worry about confidential info and whatnot while others of us hate the Google calendaring)
- Calendaring/Scheduling (a small portion of us use non-exchange Outlook, the rest... nothing). Should also offer resource (meeting rooms, etc) scheduling and the ability to share calendars.
- Chat (mostly we use Hipchat now). Must support file sharing. Ideally has a great search.
- Video Conferencing (we use Skype, but it's often a poor experience). Ideally would also permit screen sharing, I would also love recordability.
- File Repository. We need a centralized place to store important documents, policy stuff, agreements, etc. and of course there should be some level of access/role based control.
Right now we're resigning ourselves to the fact we'll probably have to cobble all of these things together to get some best of breed stuff and fill in with suitable options.
My questions:
1. Is there something that does everything we want or close to it?
2. If there's nothing that does it all what's the best of breed for each need?
3. Are we forgetting something that we'll shortly realize that we need?
We're willing to pay for this, but not an outrageous sum, of course.
In my ideal world I would be able to find a single product/service that allows our team to:
- Email (We love the idea of using Gmail for Business if for no other reason than the search, but some of us worry about confidential info and whatnot while others of us hate the Google calendaring)
- Calendaring/Scheduling (a small portion of us use non-exchange Outlook, the rest... nothing). Should also offer resource (meeting rooms, etc) scheduling and the ability to share calendars.
- Chat (mostly we use Hipchat now). Must support file sharing. Ideally has a great search.
- Video Conferencing (we use Skype, but it's often a poor experience). Ideally would also permit screen sharing, I would also love recordability.
- File Repository. We need a centralized place to store important documents, policy stuff, agreements, etc. and of course there should be some level of access/role based control.
Right now we're resigning ourselves to the fact we'll probably have to cobble all of these things together to get some best of breed stuff and fill in with suitable options.
My questions:
1. Is there something that does everything we want or close to it?
2. If there's nothing that does it all what's the best of breed for each need?
3. Are we forgetting something that we'll shortly realize that we need?
We're willing to pay for this, but not an outrageous sum, of course.
Oh. Also, you didn't really mention project management tools, but I'll bring them up anyway and say that Basecamp is lifechanging.
posted by roll truck roll at 1:51 PM on November 13, 2013
posted by roll truck roll at 1:51 PM on November 13, 2013
The big kahuna I think would be Confluence by Atlassian (which recently bought HipChat recently). It's like a wiki-style Sharepoint or something. I wish we could use it at my organization, but there's some setting up involved in the beginning and while it's easy for "users," there does have to someone who really knows what they're doing.
Basecamp isn't controllable or detailed enough for me -- I love TeamworkPM, especially for tasks -- dependent tasks, recurring tasks, etc. There's other stuff in there, too—calendars, document sharing, etc—but I don't actually use it for collaboration, just with myself (womp womp).
I was vaguely looking at Bigmarker as a collaboration tool but they really only do videoconferencing, which I don't need. But it does look nice.
For file repository, again, Confluence is great, especially because you can import existing Word documents and create wiki-editable pages out of them, and you can control editing/viewing access by section, etc. But I'm also right now experimenting with Sampepage.io. It's pretty good although I wish it had more of a robust user profile section.
We are using HipChat and have rolled it out to the whole organization. In my search for enterprise chat tools, nothing compared.
posted by thebazilist at 2:28 PM on November 13, 2013 [1 favorite]
Basecamp isn't controllable or detailed enough for me -- I love TeamworkPM, especially for tasks -- dependent tasks, recurring tasks, etc. There's other stuff in there, too—calendars, document sharing, etc—but I don't actually use it for collaboration, just with myself (womp womp).
I was vaguely looking at Bigmarker as a collaboration tool but they really only do videoconferencing, which I don't need. But it does look nice.
For file repository, again, Confluence is great, especially because you can import existing Word documents and create wiki-editable pages out of them, and you can control editing/viewing access by section, etc. But I'm also right now experimenting with Sampepage.io. It's pretty good although I wish it had more of a robust user profile section.
We are using HipChat and have rolled it out to the whole organization. In my search for enterprise chat tools, nothing compared.
posted by thebazilist at 2:28 PM on November 13, 2013 [1 favorite]
My distributed team uses Vidyo for video calls/meetings/screensharing, and it works reasonably well. We have specialized hardware in our offices’ conference rooms, and Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS clients for people working remotely. I have no idea what the pricing is like. (I believe Vidyo also provides or provided the back-end video technology used in Google Hangouts.)
We use Yammer as a place for informal sharing of links, water-cooler chatter, and miscellaneous other stuff. It's basically like a private Twitter or Facebook. Yammer was bought by Microsoft about a year ago, but the acquisition hasn't had any visible effects.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:34 PM on November 13, 2013
We use Yammer as a place for informal sharing of links, water-cooler chatter, and miscellaneous other stuff. It's basically like a private Twitter or Facebook. Yammer was bought by Microsoft about a year ago, but the acquisition hasn't had any visible effects.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:34 PM on November 13, 2013
Podio is very customizable and has most of what you want and can handle different levels of users. It works well with Google.
Google for Business truly does have almost everything you're listing, and people can use their own email clients with Gmail. You can also use other calendar software that syncs with Google Calendar, not ideal and quite kludgey, but possible. The only downside for me is that you have to be fairly disciplined about how you collectively use the shared spaces, or you can look through Google Apps and cobble together things like file repositories that work well within Google.
posted by viggorlijah at 1:30 AM on November 14, 2013
Google for Business truly does have almost everything you're listing, and people can use their own email clients with Gmail. You can also use other calendar software that syncs with Google Calendar, not ideal and quite kludgey, but possible. The only downside for me is that you have to be fairly disciplined about how you collectively use the shared spaces, or you can look through Google Apps and cobble together things like file repositories that work well within Google.
posted by viggorlijah at 1:30 AM on November 14, 2013
Slack: I haven't tried it yet but friends work on the product and the early reports have been excellent.
Perch: Not an all-in-one solution, but an interesting prospect for always-on video. Disclosure: I do some work with them.
posted by dbarefoot at 10:34 AM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]
Perch: Not an all-in-one solution, but an interesting prospect for always-on video. Disclosure: I do some work with them.
posted by dbarefoot at 10:34 AM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]
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posted by roll truck roll at 1:49 PM on November 13, 2013