Collaboration for busy communicators

The IABC UK Board has started to use an online collaborative tool/website to share documents, messages, to-do lists. The main idea behind it was to alleviate the large number of e-mails going around with important documents attached, that may or may not have copied in everyone, and that are difficult to locate when you need them.  Sound familiar?

There some amazing, easy-to-use, inexpensive (or free) tools out there:  BaseCamp, Zoho Projects and ActiveCollab. 

Basically, with a very simple set-up (it took me 5 minutes and less than £5), you can give teams of people access to a secure website where they can post documents, messages, to-do lists, milestones, or write and edit collaboratively.  There is a built-in e-mail alerting function - so when you post something new, you can send a message to other members to go and look at it on the site.  It's all very logical and civilised.

These collaborative tools/sites have been very popular within the geek tech community for a while now.  More and more communication professionals have begun using them as well, which is great because they are an excellent example of a new generation of web tools (notice I don't say web 2.0), which are applicable to all audiences and easy to use, (no matter how un-tech savvy you are). 

If any of our IABC members (or blog readers) would like to share their thoughts or experiences using these any of these tools from a communicator's perspective - we'd love to hear from you!

Comments

[Arvind]

Thanks for mentioning Zoho Projects! We would love to hear your feedback on using it.

[Mark]

I'd point people to our blog for a comparison of different web-based, collaborative project management tools, including what this new generation of tools has to offer compared to the old standard MS Project. http://www.vertabase.com/blog/category/project-management-software/

Or, just go to the main blog page and search for Basecamp or collaboration, etc.
http://www.vertabase.com/blog

[Amy Moser Serao]

We've been using BaseCamp as a collaborative tool for our board. It really helps as we all work for different companies and we now have a virtual space. We know it may take a while to transition everyone to using it, but so far so good.