The current Covid crisis has led to a boom in on-line collaboration and communication for the individual professional, the small team, or indeed a full, on-line conference.
This article is intended to give you a quick introduction to the most popular current tools and also a list of nearly everything you could possibly want.
Update: 20.09.2020
High fidelity, professional grade audio is now available on Zoom. Follow this link, discover how to activate it! https://blog.zoom.us/high-fidelity-music-mode-professional-audio-on-zoom/
See many more hints and tips for Zoom use below on this page….
Update: 25.06.2020
Useful,free and Open Source, simple browser based collaboration/meeting tools.
Designed to be worked from your browser, no downloads or complex registrations – simply choose a unique meeting room name, which auto-generates as a unique url, then share the details with your collaborator(s).
See http://talky.io
Update: 31.05.2020
A new ‘meeting’ brand on the block!
Whereby.com is a new face in the on-line meeting apps. On-line conferencing from Norway.
The free version of the service offers simple rooms, for up to four participants, with the room tag clearly featuring the name you choose.
Links to be sent participants are clear and simple, and there is no time limit even on the free version, as far as we can see.
Paid subscriptions are available, of course, allowing you to brand your meetings, choose backgrounds and have considerably more participants.
Was quick and clean for us..see more https://whereby.com/
Lists are popular, and this is a list of lists. If you are just beginning to scope communications with clients, professional partners and small groups, then this is for you.
See the list here for a wealth of options…
Using Zoom:
The free version of Zoom, a very much ‘of the moment’ group communication tool, limits your per session time to 40 minutes alas.
It is also not without its critics for security, although as of this update (April 2020) Zoom are introducing the concept of the ‘waiting room’. You can find further additional security measures introduced by Zoom on their blog here.
This will enable meeting owners to pre-approve, in effect, joiners to their Zoom session. An approving cheer has risen from the Zoom community.
Discover another full set of Zoom tutorials here…
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206618765-Zoom-Video-Tutorials
Another on-line collaborative tool is Trello. To-do lists at full speed and with energy.
Group networking with Slack for teams:
Not a new player in the street of collaboration, but widely used by larger businesses, because of the wealth of integrations with other software and tools that, in its maturity, offers the user many diverse collaborative and communication options.
Get Slack here…
A giant tool kit – Microsoft Teams:
If you are an Ms Windows users, then we think you will Microsoft Teams useful for large scale or one to one collaboration.
You can create different teams and interact with them discretely. You can chat or go visual with your camera, and also invite members to a team, even if they have a different web-mail address than you.
Even in the free version you can post bulletins, share files and have a common archive.
Get Microsoft Teams here…
Go instant, go radical, get Yac...
Yac is a new application on the block. It offers rapid, asynchronous communication, file sharing and image upload.
You only get 120 seconds to send your voice message to someone on your contact list, but they are free to respond when they are available.
You can send them a screenshot too.
Try it out, it is much slicker and intuitive than any text description. May even shorten those meetings too.
( Our developers for this site use it to send confirmation of code changes to their team members. Messages which trigger action, but do not necessarily need long replies…).
