Doesn’t matter you are just a high school grad student or high flying professional , you need to collaborate with your friends and colleague, time such it is. Though for friendly chit-chat and sharing resource and information social networks like Facebook should be more than enough. But when it comes to professional/business collaboration, the hunts for collaboration software/system begin. In case you are wondering, Collaborative software is the basis for computer supported cooperative workspace, in easy words the software/system that create a virtual office. This is also known as GroupWare.

GroupWare have its own classifications on the basis of the level of collaboration- —communication tools, conferencing tools and Co-ordination tools. But anyway the GroupWare today we will discuss fall under hybrid genre rather than just one individual category.

37signals software/app

When it’s come to Project Management software, everyone knows there is no match for Basecamp, which is a 37 signals product. Basecamp is a hoisted project management app used by millions of users like small businesses, Freelancers, designers, lawyers, publishers, teachers, manufacturers etc. Basecamp has all the tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project. The key features of Basecamp are:

Customizable design: Users have the ability to customize colours and upload logo to make their Basecamp account’s look as part of their own site.

Centralize management: Centralized dashboard which overview all the projects, clients, tasks, milestone etc. for easier management. Not to mention which can be changed according to user/group permission. File sharing can’t be easier than it is, upload file and group them into categories. You can track version, audit etc. through dashboard on the fly.

Easier task management: It’s easy to manage task of a certain projects via to-do-list. Make lists, add items, and assign responsibility, which can be viewed only by assigned user. Completed task, will automatically moved to complete section and when all task of a project’s milestone finished it automatically reflect in the dashboard.

Apart from above mentioned feature you do get obvious features such as time tracking, project management, milestones, massage boards, comments on message, Email notifications, Writeboards, chat etc. All in all if you are looking for a solid project management app/solution, Basecamp can be a solid solution. They offer six type of pricing plan one of that is free; obviously you won’t have access to features like—file sharing storage, SSL and time tracking and also in free account only one project can be active and maximum two whiteboards allowed.

37 signals also offer another collaboration app called Highrise, which is for tracking leads, clients, vendors, all in all a simple CRM.

Zoho Virtual Office

Zoho Virtual Office is a Web-based, groupware, collaboration software. It gives you an array of applications, which includes email, documents, calendar, tasks, contacts, notes, links, IM. It is free for individuals with 1GB storage, which is huge compare to even any paid collaboration suit I came across. For group/individual, $3/user/month with same storage limit per user which obviously support multiple email. This allows users to create multiple groups and provides smooth collaboration of these components within groups.

The key features of Zoho office suite that will blow your mind-highly configurable built in email and chat client that supports tagging, integrated calendar that can be shared between groups and users for better time management(you can easily export/import that in ICS format), integrated documents, spreadsheet, notes, picture and presentation creator and manager. With Zoho virtual office task management and file sharing is just a matter of few clicks.

The biggest difference between 37 signals Basecamp and Zoho Virtual office is Basecamp focus on project management itself where Zoho much more on sharing/collaboration. An excellent state of the art app that is almost free, recommended for lightweight project management such as study projects. For big scale project management try Zoho projects.

That’s all for now, in next series we will be talking about downloadable or self hosted collaboration tools, that are free/ partially free.