Collaboration solutions

Collaboration solutions for computers and mobile devices are very important in modern life, because they help us to stay in touch with certain events, processes and projects. We can keep real-time connections with our colleagues and co-workers in order of our common and individual duties. Those solutions can assist us with sharing and managing documents and files (electronic libraries), with planning and sharing business plans and schedules (business management), with reporting and controlling projects (project management), with undertaking different specific functions performed in banking, finances, medicine etc. Software development industry produces dozens of simple and software to satisfy different business needs. There are different enterprise-wide packages for in-office usage in public organizations, institutions and business companies, and online collaboration solutions working via Internet to interconnect users in different remote locations.

Review on technologies and specific examples:

As it was mentioned there are online collaboration solutions which work via Internet, using web-technologies like PHP. Such a manner is used, for example, in Google that allows you to establish teamwork with Google users through a set of internal tools like Calendar, documents and shared albums. Web systems are helpful when you need to collaborate with people from distant places, other cities and countries, but if you want to establish collaboration with colleagues working within the same office with you, then it is not what you need as far as your data will become totally unreachable when your Internet connection is down. 

You should consider internally running enterprise collaboration systems which use your corporate network and server, because this is much more reliable and faster way than Internet. Different Microsoft solutions are offered in this segment, the most of them require establishing collaboration with Sharepoint server or Exchange server. If you want to collaborate at tasks, collaboration with Outlook is a proper example of internal collaborative system working in your LAN, but to establish this you need to buy MS interactions between them. Another example is MS Word which needs purchasing and installation the Sharepoint server. As you can see Microsoft packages can appear quite complex and expensive for small and middle-size business. 

Example of simple, but effective task management collaboration solution:

VIP Task Manager is one of easy-to-use  packages for Windows. It features three interactive project management interfaces (Task List, Task Tree and Calendar) that enable you to manage business tasks and projects, to share documents, to assign tasks to employees, to plan working time, schedules and control team performance in real-time regime.

 As the advantage over more advanced systems, this software offers simplicity in installation and use. In order to use this tool you don’t need to make any complex changes in your IT infrastructure and possess any advanced skills, but you can spend just few minutes to install this software over your LAN and make easy configuration to match your specific needs. This software can be used both for working via LAN and Internet (for cooperation with customers, partners or remote workers).