Collaboration Online
On the ‘Mission to Learn’ blog (www.missiontolearn) Karen Schweitzer presents ‘15 Free Online Collaboration Tools and Apps‘, an interesting collection.
Unfortunately my own absolute favourites are missing in this list, and so I will round them up here:
- mind42.com – Collaborative Mind-Mapping in your browser. It can import and export freemind and MindManager so you can use it as a format-converter, too. Strong.
- flowchart.com – A online multi-user, real-time flowchart software. Flowcharting at its finest.
- GoogleDocs – Useful for sharing documents and spreadsheets. Solid and reliable.
- GoogleMail – in combination with GTDInbox and Firefox it becomes THE organisation-tool for David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. Email not square nor cubed but to the ten!
- Dropbox – Online storage with synchronisation (!) over several PCs.
- Jing – Make screen-videos as easy as a screenshot and upload directly to YouTube.
- DimDim – Web conferencing free up to 20 participants – and incredibly easy to use.
IT-organisation for founders and SMB (small to medium business) leaders
As founder or CEO of a small business you should generally be taking care of things other than providing a suitable IT infrastructure.
And it is easy since there are plenty of companies who offer this as a service; install an office package of a renowned supplier on your PC’s, network it all with a server that runs a groupware for email, calendar and actions. If you want (or must) add to it a CRM system for your sales team and it’s a done deal. Sometimes done for the company, too – as this infrastructure falls short of providing the required capabilities and at the same time the investment for 5 workstations can easily exceed $ 25’000 (or more) – not exactly pocket money for many startups or SMB’s…
And don’t you forget the support contract so that your software is fresh a year from now and most of all remains safe and secure against the ususal treats (viruses, trojans, worms and the likes).
This article shows how you can have it differently: faster, easier and very cost efficient, too.
IT requirements of a small and flexible company have changed considerably in the last 5 – 10 years. More and more the work is organized around projects with teams assembled ad-hoc; teams don’t get together daily in the same office either to exchange information about their progress and difficulties.
Home Office and mobile Workforce are the buzzwords for the phenomenon.
The founder/leader faces the question: How can I get my IT organisation working so that my workforce, project team(s) or salesteam can cooperate swiftly and efficiently and at the same time required IT investment does not overshoot my budget or cooperation does not lead to total chaos – emails and chat protocols are not so easily stored and attached to other project related information after all…
It seems that big traditional software vendors have completely overlooked this clientele; and at the same time they have missed the fact that nowadays with ubiquitous high-speed internet there exists an infrastructure which allows totally new approaches to solving the problem – a paradigm shift so to speak.
A locally installed office package that allows creating documents, which are then sent to colleagues or Mr. B. for revision and comments (which creates several redundant versions of the document) today is neither suitable for efficient cooperation nor does it satisfy most QA requirements. At the same time a centrally organized sales support system is an outdated old hat, which is but boring for frontline employees or sales people.
Today what is required is the following:
A central storage for documents that can be edited by several people (i.e. team) at the same time – if possible with automatic version tracking, and the option to revert to older versions when necessary.
A group-email platform with team/assistance functionality and the option to attach emails to projects, customers or sales opportunities in a flexible manner; this solution should also show communication threads grouped together so that information can be found fast and easy.
The same is for group-calender (including ressource allocation) and for contact information – i.e. customer data – for who the company is working and adding value in the end.
All of this should be accessible with a variety of devices (PC/Netbook/iPhone) and from any place, without creating security issues – as we are dealing with internal and confidential company data.
If you as the founder or SMB leader are now tearing your hair out in despair and wonder why you haven’t studied computer science, don’t panic:
There is a solution to the challenge – faster, easier and much more cost effective than you can imagine.
(continued…)
Tags:Business-organisation, Gründer, Groupware, IT-organisation, KMU, Kooperation, Startup, Team-OrganisationTrance-lator
