As businesses spread out over cities, states and countries, teams are looking for ways to collaborate remotely and maximize the efficiency of project development processes. Moreover, with agile methodologies entering a greater number of small and medium-sized organizations, the notion of collaboration expands to more than just the ability to efficiently share files and folders. It now requires stable resources to organize workflow in a way that keeps both employees and managers up to date.
Over the last few years, there has been an explosion of collaboration software to help people work together to achieve a common goal. The 7 software tools below are popular and growing niche collaboration software platforms.
1. Construction Collaboration
Viewpoint is the top construction management collaboration tool. It allows teams of managers, contractors, workers, builders and developers to all get on the same page from the idea phase all the way to the realization of the project. It provides open ways for teams to work on blueprints, construction, decoration and other key features.
2.Legal Work Collaboration
Onspring is the top collaborative legal software. Teams working on cases need to be on the same page with evidence collection, annotations or status updates. The tools also has security features that prevent other teams from getting access to private material.
3. Engineer Collaboration
Jira is upending the software collaboration space. It is providing a way for teams participating in an agile development process to iterate on software and create ideal solutions. The tool highlights contributions from each person as well as different libraries and plug-ins.
4. Enterprise Wide Collaboration
Slack is one of the most popular enterprise collaboration software tools. The company’s ambition is no less than to eliminate work emails. Rather than point to point emails, the company has created open messaging systems where teams can see the ongoing progress along with the progress of specific work projects.
5. Technology Selection Management
Selecthub is a cloud-based technology selection management (TSM) software platform that streamlines software selection and IT sourcing to be more agile and collaborative. The platform supports a comprehensive set of evaluation stages from requirements gathering to vendor shortlisting, demos and user trials, RFI/RFPs and contract negotiation.
6. Students and Teachers
Blackboard Collaborate helps learners and teachers work together to help students improve. Lesson plans, teaching tools, home work assignments and problems sets are easy to use one on one or in groups. No longer are students bound by teachers in their community, with Blackboard Collaborate, they can have access to the best teachers or tutors all around the world.
7. Marketing Teams
inMotion is a popular software tool for design and marketing teams. It focuses on the visual medium of pictures and video because marketing teams often use them in advertisements. Design teams also focus on collaborative media editing tools rather than the simple text exchanges of other popular software such as Slack and Selecthub. inMotion has sophisticated request management, project management, online proofing, and reporting tools that other platforms lack.
Overall, the seven niche platforms above are helping teams collaborate regardless of their physical location. Furthermore, as more and more people join these platforms they become exponentially more effective for all participants.