Collaborating remotely: Project management tools we love
By TRISOFT team
When it comes to collaborating remotely, there are some frontiers that we need to face and defy, one of which being the ability to safely and actively communicate with your colleagues at all times.
Here at TRISOFT most of our team is remote. We have people working all over the country and clients all over the world, so we need to organize and manage all communication efficiently in order to collaborate easily and quickly share resources and ideas.
Fortunately, there are plenty of tools in handy for anyone who needs them, so all you need to do is reach out and see which of them fits you best. To this purpose, we have made up a list of what we believe are the most useful online tools for remote collaboration at the moment.
In order to make it easier to follow, we have come up with a few main categories: Communication, Task Management, Code Sharing, Document management, File Sharing, Time tracking.
1. Communication
By Chat
Skype: the world’s most famous video call service, which you can trust for messaging, voice and video chats, desktop and document sharing.
Google+ Hangouts: it’s Skype’s little brother, a video call service enabling you to carry group video calls, watch YouTube videos, work on a Google Document, which can be shared by integrating Google+ Hangouts with Google Drive.
Campfire: gives you group chat, file sharing, video conference calls and can work with Basecamp as well.
Hipchat: is somewhat similar to Skype, except you have to pay for it after the first 30 days, if you need their Plus features.
Sqwiggle: this one aims to create quite the workplace feeling, through the use of webcams. This way, the entire team stays close and connected and all you need to do is click on someone’s image and you’ll start a conversation with them.
By Email
Google Apps for Work: it was formerly named Google Apps for Business and is made up of collaboration tools and cloud computing productivity tools. The suite includes Google’s most popular apps such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, Google Calendar and Google Docs, which are free of charge. However, Google Apps for Work offers additionally custom email addresses for your company, more than 30 GB storage for files and email, phone and email support.
Gmail: friendly, intuitive and far less complicated than its fellows, Gmail will continue to be our best friend until they invent something better.
2. Task Management
GitHub Issues will find peace with HuBoard, an instant project management tool that will help you keep a close eye and a good control over your tickets.
Jira is a great tool for your team, as it allows you to capture and organize issues, prioritize them, act on what is more urgent and closely follow-up on the outcomes. Moreover, Jira will offer you a modern and flexible service desk experience, streamlining customer requests and boosting your team’s efficiency.
Trello on the other hand does a very good job from a visual perspective. Trello breaks everything down into colorful project boards, easy to identify and work with. According to Trello, it promotes a freemium business model, as it refers to it being free of charge and high, premium quality. Adaptability is its most appreciated feature, as it seamlessly integrates with your team, your project, your business agenda. Trello features a quite simple design, but it does a pretty complicated job allowing you to manage your projects in a single glance. It also has a Facebook voting option, where colleagues on a project can ‘like’ an idea — a simple way to ask for an opinion on your work.
Wunderlist — This is an internal task management tool and as its name broadcasts it, it provides a way to wonderfully handle all your lists. More precisely, it allows the organization of personal reminders and to-do lists, setting up due dates for tasks. You can add notes and subtasks for each item, you can arrange your work or a holiday and it is available both as mobile or Web application.
3. Code sharing
git and GitHub: git is the most widely adopted version control system for software development. Github is a web-based git repository hosting service offering the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of git and at the same time adding its own particular features. On top of git, which is mainly a command-line tool, GitHub also provides a web interface and both desktop and mobile integration.
4. Document management
Google Docs: You can use it to organize as many documents, spreadsheets and presentations as you need to, with very little effort. Forget the old desktop tools, Google Docs allows you to send any file to any collaborator much easier and more efficiently, and the real-time editing is awesome. Google Docs is free.
5. File sharing
Dropbox & Google Drive: These two offer pretty much the same service — document sharing with cloud storage. Google Drive however is a bit more specialized, since you can integrate other Google software, for instance send emails via Gmail attaching the files you got stored in Google Drive. You can as well create tasks, subtasks and notes for your team members to see when they access the documents. Both are really useful and intensely used all over the world.
6. Time tracking
While Toggl and other similar tools are offering basic time tracking and invoicing features, we decided to build our own tool called Hive, comprising all the neat features you appreciate in great time management tools out there. Hive has an analytic feature, a report system and chat options altogether, making it easier for you to efficiently handle teams and projects. For now, we are dogfooding, but until it’s ready to be released on the market, you can check hivelog.com for a sneak peak.
The above depicted tools are a few of those that we think are fit for a company working with remote resources. This selection is a result of a long-time research in the field and of course, of our own personal experience. However, in any business it’s good to be flexible and always keep an open mind and an open eye for new and improved resources. Our team at TRISOFT is always ready to learn and put to good use a new tool, depending on our clients’ needs and expectations.
Since virtual offices are in trend nowadays, there is this constant need for better tools to help manage remote workers. TRISOFT goes by the philosophy of working smarter and faster, so online tools are an important asset, which we exploit to the fullest and constantly trying to find ways to reach the highest point in work effectiveness. Hive is a good example of that effort ☺
Here’s to all the nomad workers out there!
