Everyone let me introduce Anastasia Chumakova she`ll be guest writing for my blog from time to time and will be focusing on how social media can be applied to collabrating around projects…read more about Anastasia.
by Anastasia Chumakova.
Thanks Brian for the introduction and I look forward to making the connection with your readers. Let`s get started, do you have accounts on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace? Recently, I started to do so much work that I was busy almost all the time. I didn’t want my friends and relatives to think that I didn’t care for them, so I made sure that I posted short messages and pictures on my profile. This made them know, wherever they are, no matter in what time zone, that I’m ok, just pretty busy.
Is it possible that we could use social media the same way we do in our private life, but for work? The answer is yes, for my first article I`ll be discussing: online collaboration tools.
Online collaboration tools can be software or a feature within an application that enables teams to discuss projects, deadlines, tasks, scheduling, and planning. An extremely effective feature within an online collaboration tool is the ability for it to send email notifications to all members of the team who may be involved at various points throughout the project. Thus, all the discussions and relevant data are kept in one place. When any changes are brought to the discussion, everyone gets notified. Searching for emails, making phone calls or scheduling more meetings is not necessary with the use of these tools. In my opinion, collaboration tools are extremely useful as I can take a quick look at what tasks people are doing at any given moment, I can prioritize tasks to create an effective to-do list for myself. Because of this feature, I`m able to share my to-do list, and I can view other lists from my team members.
Solutions for daily task management are numerous. You can choose one according to your personal needs. I am not going to recommend or promote any in this article. You can test them for free and pick the one that you like most. Here is some sound advice that can you can use when making your choice, but understand making a choice may not be easy. First thing to consider is the price of the product and the maintenance package included or available for purchase. If you are serious about keeping your data safe and accessible, do not refuse the maintenance, however it should be affordable. Many of the collaboration tools available have been designed for enterprise, small and medium businesses (SMB) or small teams, thus giving you the option to choose whatever features you need based on the size of your organization. Based on my past experiences with open source collaboration applications, I would recommend not choosing this option for small teams unless you are a software development business and can deal with programming yourself. I`ve also discovered that enterprise solutions for the most part use project management (PM) features and tracking along with collaboration tools. In this case, collaboration tools are positioned as just another feature that comes with the software. Project management features help you to plan and control your resources, so that you can assign tasks in a more efficient way. The Tracking that comes with most enterprise solutions provides business process automation: it typically enables you to start an automated generation of tasks. Tracking is very useful in the event you have daily repeated activity, like ticketing or customer support that involves processing of like kind data in a similar way.
To sum it up, collaboration tools can enable you to create to-do list online, access it through your browser window, and store your data within a secure cloud service. What truly makes it collaborative is the ability to make comments, create notes, build wikis around projects, spur on discussions through forums, stay up-to-date with RSS feeds, and be notified by email based on tasks if necessary. As mentioned, project management features can help you plan your personal and team to-do list keeping everyone on track with needs to be accomplished and with the tracker feature you can add business process automation to deliver tasks on time to all team members.== Be sure to do your research before purchasing your collaboration tool – I`ve tried to explain some of the offerings available to-date in the market to help you make a choice. One thing to remember when trying to bring social media into your collaborative environment – the main principles is the same as Facebook: enabling people to unite online, to allow them to work in collaboration together.
—- Anastasia has been studying task management features for different collaboration solutions for many years and enjoys sharing her conclusions with you.
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