Small businesses are more mobile today than ever. No longer are we tied to physical locations, or limited by technology in communicating with partners all around the world.
This is extremely exciting on one hand – great freedom for the business owner, larger reach, and an opportunity to work with the best and the brightest from literally around the world.
On the other hand this freedom offers up a real challenge when it comes to collaboration.
Assembling Virtual Work Teams
What is the best way to put together a work team that may not be centrally located to where you do business? How do we build teams, and transfer necessary information across work groups?
These are questions I think many small businesses owners are asking themselves. And the good news is that many online collaboration tools are now available to help facilitate the new way in which we do business.
What to Look for In Online Collaboration Tools
There are many choices, and numerous advantages in using an online collaboration tool. Here are the five main things you need to look for when deciding which provider is right for you.
#1 Security
Got to put this at the top of the list. If you are going to be putting a lot of your work, confidential or proprietary information, onto the web in order to collaborate you need to be sure the provider you choose is secure. Do they auto backup data? Do you have the option for enhanced security on your pages (https)? Don’t let a breech in their security become a breech in yours.
Do your homework – Online Security Safeguarding Your Business (via3.com white paper)
#2 Flexible and Reasonably Priced User and Storage Options
You want an online collaboration solution that offers enough storage for all the documents and files you expect to be sharing across your work teams.
Also you want to be sure you can add user accounts as your work teams grow. Most providers will offer graduated pricing based on the storage you need and the number of users. Look around until you find one that looks like it will allow you to grow as your business grows without any hidden upgrade fees, or sky high pricing.
#3 A Robust Suite of Tools
The basis of online collaboration is to collaborate, right? You’ll want to be sure your provider offers a suite of collaboration tools to fit your needs.
The basics should include:
- Tasks management
- Contact management
- File sharing and storage
- Private messaging
- Chat
- To do lists
- Message boards
- Email integration
- Calendars
The sky is the limit when it comes to features, you’ll also find that some providers offer:
- Blogging
- Polls
- Photo sharing
- RSS feeds
- Wikis
- Social media tools
Pick the one that offers the right selection of tools you’ll actually use. All the bells and whistles sound nice, but if you’re not going to use them you could be paying more for these features just to have them sit there.
#4 Simplicity of Design and Function
Using online collaboration should make your life easier, not more stressful. Look for a simple to use tool that encourages users to, well, use it! If it is too hard to understand, too cumbersome to work with, and more trouble than the end result, you’re going to have a hard time rallying the troops to make the switch to online work groups.
#5 Offers a No Obligation Free Trial
You really don’t know what you’ll be getting from any provider until you are in there using the software day in and day out. Do not sign up for something until you’vehad a chance to test drive the product and make sure it works for you and your business. Most will offer at least a 2 week trial so you can get the feel for how the system works before committing.
What are the Choices?
The choices are vast, and you will need to do your research. Early this year Business Pundit put out a great article, The 10 Best Collaborative Web Tools for Business , which should help you in your search.
They list their top 10 providers, as well as pros and cons of each, and a comprehensive overview of the software and service. OfficeMedium (latest sponsor of this blog) was rated as the #1 choice.
If online collaboration is something you’ve considered we recommend you head over there and check them out, see if what they offer is right for you.
Final Thoughts
The world is getting smaller, and we small businesses owners are able to do business in places we could only dream of a few short years ago. Online collaboration could mean a greater reach, with more efficiency to the small business. If you’re considering getting your teams together virtually, do your homework on the options out there and try out some of the solutions that look like they could work for you.
Photo Credit: lumaxart
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For small businesses that don’t need all the task management functions, both Google and Office Live have work spaces for teams. I prefer using the shared calendar and email functions (labels) in Google, but Office live has workspaces that you can upload and download files, rather than using the Google Docs. This can be very helpful sometimes (voice mails, images, storage, etc.).
I am sure that with all the options out there for both workspaces and task administration that a small business owner could find everything they needed (or wanted) to have in either free or reasonably priced options.
Hi Matt,
I probably won’t have a need for collaboration for a while, but I’m curious, is OfficeMedium your choice for the service that fits all of the criteria. Me being the curious sort, I’d be interested in seeing what they offer and if you’ve used them what your experience was like.
Cheers!
George
George Angus´s last blog ..How To Publish Your Ebook On Amazon’s Kindle
@George
I’m still in the data gathering stage myself, as I think an online collaboration tool could help me in my business. I home base in Portland, Oregon but run most of our business out of Florida. There are a few times a year when we are VERY busy in Florida and I am working with numerous people almost full time over the phone, emails, and in person (which means me making trips from Portland to Florida). I’m thinking if I could get these groups together online it would be more effecient for everyone, and I’d save some money on travel. OfficeMedium looks like they fit the bill for what I’d be looking for. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles, just a way to collaborate that is simple and easily accessable. The way my business runs I most likely won’t be trying anyone out until the fall, by the end of March I am pretty much done with the season and don’t do a lot of business over the summer that would require an online collaboration tool.
Just my two cents,
Matt
@George
Please feel free to try out live demo:
http://www.officemedium.com/demo
That way you can gauge the functionality for yourself.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Great article. One can also look for communication tools (email) in ones collaboration package, because in recent times the market is moving towards integrated collaboration and messaging (Google Apps, Microsoft BPOS). We had done a related article on what people should look for in a SaaS solution titled “SaaS Vendor Selection”. You may want to look at it.
Hi Matt,
It sounds like having these tools for you would be a no-brainier. Having the kind of tools that OfficeMedium has to offer would make sense. Being based in Oregon and collaborating with Florida would put these tools to good use.
For me my office is 5 miles away, however, my co-workers and myself do not always go to the office. This maybe a good solution for us to work in a secured environment. Free trial, and at $6 bucks a month per user, very doable, even for small companies.
Rob
Rob Wagner SBA Funding´s last blog ..Will Microloans Help Small Business Create Jobs?
@Rob
I think it could make good sense even if you are relatively close to the people you work with, but just don’t want to have to come to a central location to meet. Like you say, for the price and the tools you get it may be nice to offer remote working environments to your team just as a convenience.
Matt
Like Penny mentioned, a great product for small businesses is Microsoft Office Live. Office Live allows you to store documents online as well as have multiple users collaborating on one document. Another great feature of Office Live is Small Business, which allows companies to build their own websites. It is template based, which means you do not have to have coding knowledge. It creates very professional websites as well as inexpensive web hosting fees, which includes a personalized website name as well as a company email address.
Check out some of the companies that are currently taking advantage of Office Live and to learn more about all it can do:
http://www.officelive.com/en-us/
Cheers,
Bryn
MSFT Office Live Outreach
We use Basecamp a lot and I think it is quite simple for all types of users and it offers a great collaboration platform for virtual workforce.
MS Office Live is also useful as it has many useful features. Good to use if your organization has complex collaboration needs.
Good points, though i would reorder the list as 1,3,4,5,2.
Sococo’s team space (www.sococo.com) is another innovative tool in this space. they offer virtual offices for every team member making it seem like communicating live. great design, features and very secure.
It’s really nice list of tips when seeking online collaborators I’d really take note of these ones. Thanks
Some great advice.
From the viewpoint of our business, one of the great things about the tools we use (http://www.ice3-portal.co.uk) is the fact that it can work from a subdomain of our company domain and can be branded with our corporate colours.
This means that our clients, partners are largely unaware that we are using a 3rd party solution.
That is great news for our business giving us an edge on our competitors.
What did we do before online collaboration?
Peter
You should try SambaJAM.
In my biased opinion, we have the best document library out there. Context menus like windows explorer, drag and drop, no waiting for endless pages to load, you can upload whilst you continue to manage your documents, you can preview documents online (images, office docs, videos), you can edit them online, send them as email attachments or links, assign them to workflows, comment on them, and more.
Soon enough you will even be able to create documents directly online as well as edit them collaboratively i.e. two people editing the same document at the same time. Not to mention the Tasks feature currently under development (we will be releasing a blog about it soon enough
).
Check it out.
I believe this is a really good top five list. I like the fact that security was listed first. Many “free” options are lacking when it comes to security, as evidenced by the fact that the paid options from the same company have “enhanced security” listed as a feature.
There are so many good tools available that we decided to use a tool that targets my particular job function. I am Sales Executive and we use the Business Collaboation Network (BCN) by DRE Software, Inc. (www.dresoftware.com). They are a new player and they target sales and marketing professionals. They have announced to current clients that they will have full web conferencing capabilities added to the next major release (8/2010) and our price will not increase. This is a big deal for us since we use web conferencing all the time. To have it all in one app for one low price per month is a BIG deal.
They have a free trial and they are really flexible with their corporate plans. I highly recommend them.
Following searching Google I found your site. I think both are good and I will be coming back to you and them in the long term. Many thanks