Whether you’re working with teams within your organisation, or with clients or partners elsewhere, collaboration is at the heart of business. On the face of it, the challenges of collaboration are relatively straightforward. After all, you’re used to working together within the office – isn’t it the same when some of the people in the team are working elsewhere?
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Effective collaboration means ensuring that all of the documents and facilities that the team needs are available to everyone, no matter where they’re working, whether that’s in your office, at home, or in a completely different company.
Collaboration is about sharing and communicating documents and ideas, and making the process of sharing as simple as possible. If it’s as easy to share a document with someone on the other side of the world as it is to share it with someone sitting next to you, then your collaboration systems are working perfectly.
Voice and conferencing
Of course, the first requirement for effective collaboration is efficient, low-cost communications, no matter where the members of the team are, and this means voice. For collaboration with other companies, this shouldn’t be a problem. However, if you have remote workers, perhaps working from home, then you need to ensure that their voice communications are cost effective. If someone is using their home phone and charging the costs back to your company via expenses, this is unlikely to be a cost-effective solution.
Installing a second line for a home worker isn’t cost effective either. However, assuming that the home worker has broadband – something which should be a base-level requirement anyway – you can quickly and easily isolate the costs using a Voice over IP product like Demon Voice over Broadband, or other similar services. These work by using your broadband connection to make voice calls, which leaves your home worker's personal line free and can be billed separately from their home phone line.
Alongside telephone calls, you'll also require tools for voice conferencing, to enable, for example, your cross-company teams to meet virtually and talk about a project's status. There are many voice conferencing products available from companies like THUS. When looking for a voice conferencing system, there are several things to consider. Firstly, how many people will need to have access to a conference? If a system offers up to 100 callers, but you will only ever require ten or so, then you may be paying over the odds for features you don't need. Secondly, there is the question of security: do you need password-protection on calls so that only those with the correct password can join the conference?
If all you need is irregular calls between a handful of people, you may not even need specific conferencing software at all. Some Voice over IP services allow you to create conferences between a limited number of participants for free. However, most of these services rely on calls being made from your computer, which may make them unsuitable if some users are dialling in from an ordinary phone.
Meetings
Sometimes, however, voice conferencing isn't enough for a meeting and you may need other facilities like a whiteboard too. Thankfully, there are many conferencing services that add the ability to have ‘virtual meeting rooms’, with presentation features as well. One example of this is Microsoft Live Meeting. This application allows multiple participants to connect to a conference, and includes a shared whiteboard, and application and desktop sharing, so that a participant can demonstrate something actually happening on their computer. Live Meeting also includes the ability to make a presentation from a PowerPoint file available to everyone in the conference, which means it can be a viable way of making presentations when all participants can’t be physically present.
Project and document management
One of the key elements of collaboration is the ability to easily share documents. Although it's possible to simply email files, the big drawback of this method is that you inevitably have multiple versions of the same file floating around, and it's easy for people to get confused between versions.
There are several products, however, that can help you manage documents more easily, as well as acting as management hubs for the entire project. For example, Basecamp is a low-cost online tool based entirely on the web, which not only allows you to store and share files (and track versions as they're created), but which includes a simple, yet powerful project management system. This lets you set milestones and ‘to dos’, as well as track the time that participants have spent on a project for billing purposes. The product also includes whiteboards, message boards, and personal messaging between participants, and you can set permissions so you can control who can see which of your company's projects.
Thanks to the Internet and advances in network technology, collaborative working is no longer something which can only be done in the office. There are plenty of tools around which let you manage and execute projects no matter where the participants happen to be, and without major cost, too. Collaboration has never been easier.