4 Insanely useful Collaboration Tools Your Team Should Know

Do you remember the first time when you saw the real-time collaboration feature for Google Docs first time? Now it seems obvious, but in 2005 seeing changes happen live felt nothing short of magical.

Today, after ten years, Google Drive continues to add improvements, Microsoft is offering real-time collaboration in their on-line version of Office, and Dropbox is working on a real-time collaboration app of their own.

But, still many people are stuck using the email-and-collect-revisions method of collaboration. Today, many cool websites and apps looks at four tools that fix that for you.

1. Fiddle.md: It is limited to writers in one key way, i.e. it offers a word processor. While for millions word processors are the default tool for writing, but for a growing number of people their paper-focused design is obsolete. And so the popularity of Markdown is growing, which is a quick way to format documents destined for the web.

Fiddle.md allows you collaborate on Markdown files. The interface features a real-time-preview, and also you don't even need an account to try the service.

2. GraphPaper: If you are looking for a way to combine a bunch of different collaboration tools, then GraphPaper is probably worth a look. This tool lets you quickly make a sheet combining images, text and even embeds from other websites.

3. Canavaniser: If you love the idea of brainstorming with your team and are looking for something simple, then try Canavanizer. This tool provides you a variety of brainstorming templates which you can use to think up ideas with your team.

4. Frame.io: This app looks to make collaborating on anything – from images to videos to sound – easily. In Frame.io, annotation tools, comments and the ability to upload various revisions of the same file all are there in one place. A free account gives you 2 GB to work with, for more than that you will have to upgrade.

These were the four insanely useful collaboration tools that your team should know. But, there might be chances that one of your favorite tools wasn't covered. So, share your favorite real-time collaboration tools with us in the comments below.

5 Steps to Cross Organizational Collaboration and Teamwork

Teamwork and collaboration make an important contribution to the success of business initiatives.  To create effective teamwork, you need to break down any departmental barriers to collaboration so that you can draw on the best people. Set clear objectives and define working relationships so that members can work as a cohesive team.

Here are the five Steps to cross organizational collaboration and Teamwork:

Overcome barriers: One among the major barriers to effective collaboration is the conflicting needs and priorities of the team and the individual departments in your company. All department managers have their own targets to meet and may be reluctant to release key staff for external projects. So, you need to convince departmental heads of the importance and benefits of the team project and persuade them to cooperate.

Agree Direction: Project teams need a clear sense of direction to turn members into a team. You can encourage shared ownership by asking team members to agree the key objectives and define the benefits to the organization.

Recruit Members: Cross-functional teams bring together people with the skills and experience to deal with all aspects of a project. Ask your human resources department to maintain an up-to-date skills profile to find the right people. The profile should include personal skills, important achievements, work experience and involvement in other team projects.

Clarify Responsibilities: A balanced team includes all the skills your team needs to complete its work at different stages of the project. For example, projects like new product development will require different contributions at each stage.  So, it is important for each member to understand their role and responsibility at each stage.

Support Collaboration: Your team will work more effectively if it has the tools to support easy collaboration, like email and instant messaging simplifies communication between members and makes it easy to share documents, project updates and other essential information. Also, accessing information from a single source helps to eliminate the risk of duplication or working on out-of-date information.