There are a lot of fantastic tools freely available on the web that enable you to collaborate with colleagues, expand your network, schedule tasks and share a calendar, exchange large files and so on.
These technologies were developed with thousands of highly skilled man-hours and are usually paid for by revenues from online advertising. That means they are free resources your company would pay tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Euros to develop from scratch.
I'm just going to go over the main points of the generic tools that are applicable to most industries. Some of these are high profile but nevertheless:
Networking Tools
These are networking tools that enable your company to constantly outreach, doing a little each day rather than a huge amount all at once. LinkedIn is dedicated to professional networking and with 50 million members and growing, it's not a tool you'll want to ignore. Likewise with Facebook, with over 300 million members it is a vast resource for businesses to market themselves and is a common communication platform on which to connect with individuals and groups.
And Twitter, it's kind of like Marmite - you either love it or hate it. But this is a tool that allows you to get out snappy, short bits of info that keep you in people's minds. Twitter is becoming the gel that integrates both Facebook, LinkedIn and other social platforms because you can feed your tweets through them.
Productivity tools
There are many small development companies that have created really excellent productivity tools, like Basecamp from 37Signals. But here I'm talking about freebies. And who better to offer powerful free software than Google.
When you create a Google account you get to add many features to it. You can select from a long list of software applications, depending on what you need and would find useful. As with most of Google's stuff, there's a low learning curve, so if you've basic computer skills you can just start using these without too much fuss.
My top apps are:
Google Docs - You can create or upload files and folders that are stored and worked from online. If you work on several computers, and would like to collaborate with colleagues on documents, then check it out. Export and save copies to your desktop as you wish.
Google Calendar - Plan your week or month ahead and select whatever info you need to share with your colleagues, so your efforts are coordinated. You can create many calendars to keep tasks and roles separated. But, again, it's online so if you're traveling, working on many computers, or using mobile then online tools are your best option.
Google Reader - Many websites today have fresh and new content added to them daily, weekly or at various intervals. Instead of having to go back and visit them one by one to see what's new, you can "subscribe" to them by using Google Reader. This app will pool all the new stuff together from your selected websites and show them to you as a heading with short description. This helps you sift through large amounts of information quickly and pick out what's relevant or of interest. Keep in the loop on many topics in minutes rather than hours.
Gmail - This is a powerful email app that also comes with a lot of free storage. But, integration is probably the main point to make here. When it comes to productivity it's a major benefit to have software integration. For example, you can setup reminders in your calendar that will email you alerts to your Gmail account.
Google Wave - On the theme of integration, Google Wave promises to be a huge contribution to the web as far as productivity tools are concerned. This software is not on general release yet but it's defined as "a personal communication and collaboration tool". It will merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking, which collectively add up to a large share of why people go online.
Ok, so I'm sure you get the idea - there's loadza stuff out there for free that you can use. Don't want to make this 'blog too long, so just go check them out and enjoy.
