You can say about globalization what you want; having access to worldwide resources clearly is a huge advantage and I believe we still are at the very beginning of discovering new ways to better network globally.

With the continued rapid growth of Internet access and bandwidth, an entire industry has mushroomed in the last decade that is focusing exclusively on online collaboration and data exchange.

Working with teams and people from different backgrounds (both cultural and industry) is challenging enough. When you work with people that are spread out across different countries and time zones, it gets even more challenging.

That’s where technology comes into the picture; you can limit physical interactions to a minimum and still work effectively.

Here’s how we manage projects with partners overseas:

With the exception of a few meetings, most of our conferences are entirely online. We use Premium Skype accounts to run multi conference calls (both audio and video if required)
Skype is also great because you can create landline phone numbers for any country of your choice. This is especially useful if your clients or partners prefer local calls within their country of operation
Whenever we need to exchange large files or documents, we use Dropbox. Again you need purchase a sufficient storage plan but unless you work in music or video production, the standard storage plans should be sufficient. You can set up several folders with different sharing or permission settings.
One task management app I cannot promote highly enough is Wunderlist to the team for the tracking our to dos. We have one internal and one external list (the former for our core team and the latter we share with our partners). Wunderlist is really great because it allows you to simultaneously access shared lists and you can update actions with comments (e.g. on the progress). I cannot emphasize enough how much I love this program/app.
Another essential program that I wouldn’t want to miss is Evernote. A classic. There’s no other document tool I know that can do the job like Evernote. Whatever article, report or website you come across that you deem interesting for the team/your project, you can upload it to Evernote, tag it and share it with the team. Examples of documents I upload to the shared Cinbud notebook:
- Sitemaps
- Sketches for all kinds of different ideas I want to share
- Entire presentations (pdf’ed for better viewing)
- Evernote comes with a browser plug in that let’s you ‘clip’ websites into your notebook. Any website I come across that I find interesting gets clipped and tagged into our Evernote notebook.
Teamviewer is one of my favorite VNC programs. Remote access tools make it very easy and cost effective to support users (including friends and family members) without the need of having their devices physically in front of you
The list of course wouldn’t be complete without Cloud based document management tools such as Google Docs, where you can have several users edit the same document and track changes and versions as you go along.
Cloud based calendar services are as plenty as it gets and there are many shared calendar products out there. Just pick one you like and synch events across different users and different time zones.
If you are working in the field of web development than there are several wire-framing tools that allow online sharing of prototypes, hugely reducing development times and efforts in the production environment. Prototyping digitally is becoming more and more popular for several reasons:
- It makes designing and testing the user experience a lot easier
- You can share the prototype online with your client or other team members
- It reduces the number of iteration cycles due to mismatching expectations during the briefing/conception phase (and therefor increases the overall development time)
Our favorite prototyping tool is Axure. With Axure you can develop fully functioning prototypes with no experience whatsoever in programming. Drag and drop, import images and artwork, simple visual effects, the list is long. Not the cheapest wireframing solution but definitely worth the money as far as we are concerned. It’ll take you a day to fully grasp all the features and then you’re good to go. Axure lets you share online prototype links that you can password protect.

Luke, are you gonna send out the meeting minutes for this session?

There’s a lot more I missed here but the above represent the essential tools we use for online collaboration. Of course there also products that target the corporate segment (which come with different data protection/ encryption systems) but the above to us represents an affordable infrastructure for start-ups and low budget enterprises.

Everything from the above list by the way qualifies perfectly for both professional and personal use (e.g. you could use Wunderlist to share an online shopping list with your wife) and thus the investment pays off double.

Whatever you use, I believe there are plenty of tools available that make online collaboration a charm. The saying that the world is your oyster is now truer than ever. What you make out of it is a different story…