Best Collaboration Software

Why do We Need Collaboration Software?

Collaboration Software is a unified package catering to all the collaboration needs of multiple users of an organization. It provides several media through which the workforce can communicate, share information, schedule tasks and work together. It offers project collaboration tools, email services, shared calendaring, message boards, video conferencing, VoIP services and the like. Collaboration software enables employees to come together and work on the same project or document over a local or even a remote network. With all these services and features, Collaboration Software is absolutely essential in today’s business world.

What are The Benefits of Collaboration Software?

Collaboration software brings a host of benefits to the 21st-century workplace such as:

1. It allows for project tracking. It increases productivity, reduces duplication and improves knowledge retention. It makes information more discoverable by allowing for transparency and fosters innovation.

2. It helps save costs that could have been incurred because of travel and other modes of communication. It reduces several operational and product development costs.

3. It makes reporting easy.

4. It allows for better management of projects and increases the efficiency of the tasks. It also improves efficiency of learning by knowledge sharing and also the efficiency of task distribution. Speed of access to knowledge gets increased.

5. It improves team organization and employee satisfaction. It enables real-time discussion between personnel involved in a project

6. It is essential for business success. By virtue of the options it opens up for scheduling, delegating, tracking, communication and good organization, collaboration software makes business tasks much more simplified and improves turn-around time and ease of working. 

7. It improves customer relationship and increases client satisfaction by facilitating seamless communication and tracking. It creates awareness, consideration and improves conversion. Supply chain costs are also reduced which increases vendor satisfaction.

What are The Features of Collaboration Software?

In order to facilitate effective collaboration between your workforce, the Collaboration Software you are looking to buy must have certain features:

1. Support All Methods of Communication:

Good collaboration software must have integrated messaging features which allow users viewing one file to leave messages for other users whose review they seek, in the same file. It must also have the scope for allowing private conversations when required. You must also check what is the maximum number of people that the software allows to join on a conference call, what is the fee involved for adding extra participants, mode of meeting, etc. It should facilitate screen sharing with good annotation tools for remote collaboration and be able to store project conversations in a centralised location. The software must also support multiple monitors.

2. Simple Interface and Customizable

Your Collaboration software must have an intuitive interface with simple navigation. It should be able to integrate with your current infrastructure and must be able to work on different platforms. It should be scalable and should support OS updates that might take place in the future. Most importantly, the software must be fully customizable to suit the needs of the organization.

3. Scheduling Features

It must be able to create task lists so that monitoring is possible for all the project tasks in motion. The task list must be based on the deliverables of the project assign task owners with specific responsibilities. The tasks should be scheduled with deadlines added to the calendar. It must also be able to monitor progress and generate timely reminders.

4. Dynamic File Sharing

It must have an online repository where users can store and access files easily. Since, the files are being accessed by multiple users, sometimes external users as well, it must have adequate security features for protection of data and information. Additionally, it must be able to support a wide range of file types. 

5. Real-Time Collaboration

For proper management and tracking of changes to the files, collaboration software must have some key features for real-time updation. Before you finalise on collaboration software, make sure to check how many internal and external collaborators can be added for using a product and how many of them can use it simultaneously. Since, multiple users may be working on the same file, it must be able to create an audit trail so that changes made by each user can be tracked. It must also have multiple levels of access so that only certain authorized users can overwrite changes and lock the files for editing.

What are The Drawbacks of Collaboration Software?

Since, collaboration software brings together several personnel, a disadvantage that may arise is it can create conflicts due to opposed ideologies and working styles of different personnel. It may lead to the emergence of too many faux leaders which may interfere with the job getting done. It may also increase the tension between the staff leading to possible ambiguities about roles and responsibilities. This results in longer decision-making times. Moreover, when collaboration needs to take place between different cultures and language groups, it may not work. 
Even with these disadvantages, effective use of collaboration software, with proper measures in place for tackling the ambiguities that arise, will work wonders for your organization.

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