As we are in a world that is hot, flat, crowded and dearer, we are always trying to cut cost in all our businesses, particularly when our receivables are shrinking day by day due to recession and competition. Are we making full use of the tools that made the world flat?
Still we are commuting to our offices spending at least 2 hours per day in hot and crowded cities, spending heavily on software licenses, overseas calls and travel costs for client and operational meetings. This article intends to underscore the benefits of online collaboration and switching to open source tools.
Rely on skype for making calls, audio and video chat. The voice clarity is so good than any other chat applications. When you make all your team members in a geographically distributed project to log in to skype, you can monitor all the tasks from your home and can get any one online when required. There are so many other applications like Gchat, yahoo messenger etc. You can reduce the number of business travels with virtual meetings with the help of webex, ooVoo, yugma, tokbox etc.
Google Apps is another set of applications which enables online collaboration with its Docs, Gmail and Calendar. These are very stable applications for shared document access with different access rights and project scheduling. The mail notifications and SMS alerts are found to be working very well in calendar. Most of our geographically distributed projects require shared access for the same file. Most of our deliverables are documents, spread sheets or presentations. MindQuarry is another tool for file sharing and team collaboration. Microsoft has announced recently about a free version of its dominant Office software that users can access over the Web.
For project management, look for Projectpier and basecamp. For timesheet tracking and invoicing go to getharvest.com. Bugzilla is a great pick for bug tracking. If you keep your eyes open, there are so many ‘ready to use’ open source applications which will make our life easy and at no extra cost !!
Current open source operating systems are mature enough for serious businesses. A carefully selected Linux OS with Open Office suite and Firefox browser is competent enough to perform the day to day operations of many businesses. Mail clients like thunderbird, opera etc. are more standardized. Google is planning to release its new OS Chrome in the near future. VLC media player is compatible with more media file formats. In the recent version VLC can play High Definition Video files as well.
There are more terms like mind mapping, crowdsourcing, brainstorming etc being used commonly today. Most of them refer to the usage of online collaboration tools only. We can even build our knowledge repository by encouraging our employees to blog their success stories and other work related issues in any of the blogging sites like blogspot or wordpress. Twitter can be used for releasing the statements and company status updates to reach the stakeholders quickly. Investing time on evaluating the necessary Collaboration tools and open source applications along with our process reviews will save a fortune in our budget. Spending a little on to tweak the open source application for our own customized processes will bring more benefits. Sometimes we may even find some better practices for our organization while evaluating these tools. We need a paradigm shift in switching to the new age of online collaboration and open source era. The chances are looking bright for open source softwares competing with commercial players. With high penetration of broadband internet connectivity and the growing tele-working practices, online collaboration tools are essential for us. All we need to do is to think differently and work efficiently.
Follow the link to find the different free and commercial online collaboration tools that are available in the market
The above article is written by me for the next edition of our organisation's In-house magazine. Whether this gonna make it to the edition or not, I wanted to publish it here....
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