As companies embrace digital workplaces, it can be challenging to encourage collaboration among teammates who may have never even met face-to-face. That’s what makes collaboration software so vital.
It’s more important than ever to have a central place where your teammates can connect—and the good news is, there’s plenty of technology to help you create a collaborative workplace.
The right collaboration software makes it easier for your teams to work together, whether they’re across the world or across the table from each other. And if you choose tools that integrate with your communication system, you’ve got a true collaboration hub.
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What is team collaboration software?
Collaboration software is any software that’s designed to help teams work together more effectively across distances and departments. It typically consists of a central platform accessible to all team members, where they can communicate, share ideas and data, and work together on projects.
This category of software can include project management, task management, video meeting, whiteboard, team messaging, andfile sharing platforms.
It’s not just about internal collaboration—teams can also use software to connect with clients. For example, they couldwork collaboratively with customers through video calls or by sharing screens to solve problems together.
Collaborative solutionskeep everyone connected and on the same page. Ideally, to maximize efficiency and keep your tech stack lean, you need to create a collaboration hub where the software is integrated with communication tools like yourbusiness phone system.
What are thebenefits of a collaboration solution?
Collaboration software gets everyone together in one place digitally, even if they can’t be in one physical space. It helps those working remotely to feel connected to each other and to the organization, which promotes a sense of camaraderie and boosts employee satisfaction.
Collaboration solutions improve teamwork by giving employees the right tools, making it easier to share information and ideas and avoid silos. When everyone can see what their colleagues are doing, there’s more transparency and a clear path toward shared goals.
Among the benefits of a collaboration tool are greater efficiency and productivity. For example, teams don’t have to create multiple versions of a file and send it back and forth—they can all work on the same document and see a history of changes. There’s less risk of misunderstandings or duplicated tasks.
With the right software, you can create a collaborative culture in your business and reinforce to your team that sharing information across departments isn’t just a nice idea—it’s how things are actually done in your workplace. (Learn more about the keys to effective collaboration.)
The ability to integrate collaboration and communication tools is a game-changer. Let’s say you integrateapps in your marketing tech stack with your comms system. You could then receive notifications about campaigns right in your team messaging app, and loop in the sales and support teams so they’re ready to field any questions from customers.
The best collaboration tools for business
There are hundreds of team collaboration toolsout there, aimed at various teams and industries. We’ve picked out some of our favorites to cover most collaboration needs—and even better, RingCentral integrates with almost all of them.
The all-in-one communication and collaboration tool
The foundation of collaboration is communication, so it’s vital to have the right centralcommunication tool to connect everyone in the organization.RingCentral covers all bases, offering omnichannel communication, built-in collaboration tools, and multiple integrations.
The unified solution allows you to communicate in a variety of different ways, from phone calls to video meetings to team messaging. You can jump on avideo call, share screens and brainstorm on a whiteboard in real time, and share files—all in the same platform:
Plus, with the task management functionality, you can assign and track the progress of projects among your team, and everyone can see what they’re each working on, too.
Having task management and communication in one place means that you can stay on top of projects easily.Checking in with a team member? Assign a follow-up task right from that conversation, and attach the relevant file they need to get the job done:
RingCentral is incredibly useful forcustomer service teamwork as well. With customer conversations taking place in your collaboration hub, support teams can get answers quickly by messaging or adding the right team members to the conversation.
🏆 Did you know:
RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center both earned TrustRadius Top Rated awards for their exceptional customer satisfaction.
Asana is a work management platform that helps you organize tasks and projects within teams and across different departments. You can automate workflows, streamline approvals, and create a single work record to avoid duplications.
It lets you break a larger project down into smaller tasks, assign them to the right people, and set due dates. You can then track work and monitor progress on real-time dashboards, which show when a team is overloaded and where resources are needed most.
You can organize and view your work as a list, calendar, timeline, Gantt chart, or Kanban board. New AI tools include smart summaries and intelligent insights, while Asana is hot on security with permissions and privacy controls.
Asana also integrates with RingCentral, sending when your boards or cards are updated, eliminating email clutter, and upleveling your team messaging app to a true collaboration hub.
Basecamp is a project management platform designed for small teams. It gives you a single-page view for each project, with customizable sections including a card table (Basecamp’s take on Kanban boards), to-do list, a library for relevant docs and files, a centralized message board, and a team chat area just for that project.
There’s also a tracker at the top to let you see progress, which is automatically updated, plus a single timeline of project activity below the other sections. The idea is that everything’s in one place so you don’t waste any time trying to find it.
If you’re overseeing multiple projects, the Mission Control feature gives you a birds-eye view. You can schedule events, deadlines, and milestones, and pull them into your shared calendar. Notifications only go to the team members who need them, to avoid unnecessary distractions.
You can connect Basecamp to RingCentral via Zapier, setting up workflows with actions that happen in response to “triggers” (for example, adding a note to a file when a relevant phone call ends).
Google Drive enables teams to create, store, share, and collaborate on files and folders from any device. You don’t need to convert file formats, and can edit and store over 100 file types including PDFs, CAD files, and images.
Multiple teammates or even people from outside your company can collaborate on a single document at the same time—you can view edits while others type, ask questions in comments, and communicate through built-in chat. No more endless versions of docs flying back and forth over email.
Plus, Google integrates with RingCentral to allow for seamless file management within your chat software. You don’t even have to send an email to share a file—just import the file from Google Drive right into your team chat, and everyone has access.
Pricing: Google Workspace is free for personal use; $6/user/month for businesses.3
Bit.ai is a document management and knowledge base solution that lets teams create and collaborate on files, as well as organizing all their knowledge in workspaces, folders, documents, and wikis. There’s unlimited folder hierarchy and a Smart Search feature.
The co-editing, comments, real-time notifications, and auto-stored version history help you collaborate smoothly, and you can also set up invite-only custom workspaces for secure data sharing with permission controls.
You can create interactive documents and wikis and add various types of content and media formats. Share them via a live link on any channel, or embed them onto any website or blog and update them in real-time.
Pricing: Free plan; paid tiers from $8/member/month.4
💡 Pro-tip:
Sharing files within your chat platform helps to keep everything in one place, so there’s less hunting to find what you’re looking for later.
Slack is a team messaging tool that organizes your conversations into channels for projects, topics, or teams. Everyone has a shared view of the information, including new members. All conversations and files become a searchable archive (even when projects or channels have ended).
You can also send direct messages to individual colleagues, and there’s the option to keep channels and groups public or private. Slack Connect lets you bring people from external organizations into your secure channels.
Slack enables you to share files and recorded video and audio clips. If you want to discuss something in-depth, use Slack Huddles to start a live voice or video conversation—either 1:1 or with up to 50 people.
RingCentral integrates with Slack, enabling you to start a RingCentral Video meeting directly from Slack (with up to 200 participants) or make a call using RingCentral from the native call icon.
Pricing: Free plan; paid plans from $7.25/user/month.5
You might think of Teams as a video calling app, but it has other collaboration tools including team messaging and document management. You can send instant messages to groups or individuals (including people outside your organization with Teams Connect), and share links and files.
Teams lets you start a call from a message, record voice messages and video clips, and move email threads from Outlook into your chats. The messaging service has rich text editing, translation, customizable notifications, and the option to name and pin group chats.
You can also co-author and edit documents simultaneously, with automatic sync and version history tracking. By integrating Teams with RingCentral, you can add reliable telephony, advanced calling features, business SMS, and online fax into the mix.
Pricing: Standalone Teams Essentials plan $4/user/month, or you can get it as part of Microsoft 365.6
Salesforce is a comprehensive CRM tool for sales, service, and marketing teams, bringing all customer data into one place for a single view. With a central dashboard and cloud-based access, teams can easily collaborate across departments—and communicate effectively with customers.
Features include account and lead management, email marketing and campaign analytics, and case management and omnichannel routing for customer service.
Salesforce Chatter is an enterprise social network that lets colleaguescollaborate on sales opportunities, service cases, campaigns, and projects. You can share files, track project work, and discuss ideas or direct customer feedback in a forum.
With RingCentral’s Salesforce integration, you can make and receive calls directly from your Salesforce account, and get notifications about case updates and opportunities right in your chat platform. Support teams can stay within one platform for both team and customer communications.
HubSpot is another CRM platform that connects your various teams and departments, with tools for marketing, sales, service, content, commerce, and operations. These are split into modules called “hubs”, which are available to buy separately or in a bundle.
Service tools include ticketing and team email plus an AI chatbot, while sales teams can use contact management, deal pipelines, and a reporting dashboard. There’s also email marketing, ad management, a website builder, and invoicing and quoting capabilities.
Don’t forget, you can embed key RingCentral capabilities into your HubSpot CRM account. For instance, you can answer inbound and make outbound calls without navigating away from HubSpot, and access all RingCentral text messages, voicemails, and faxes from one place.
Pricing: Free plan with tools covering all hubs; paid plans for each hub from $15/user/month.8
💡Pro-tip:
Having your marketing and sales tools both connected with your communication tool allows these teams to communicate better than ever before.
Since your sales and marketing staff can both see everything they’re working on in RingCentral’s messaging app, they can easily share updates and communications. Marketing can keep the sales team updated on new resources they’re creating, and sales can submit content requests and see the emails their prospects are receiving.
🕹️ Get a hands-on look at how RingCentral works by booking a product tour:
Figma is a collaborative app for design and development teams. It enables designers, developers, and copywriters to co-create and refine designs in one shared file, and you can even invite external contractors and clients.
You can communicate via audio or chat within a file, and add feedback comments. There’s also a version history feature that tracks changes to any project. The FigJam feature (priced separately) lets you brainstorm, diagram, and visualize ideas in a shared online whiteboard.
The app sends design status updates when a project is changed, completed, or ready to build, so you can track progress. For enhanced collaboration between designers and devs, Figma makes it easy to translate designs into code.
It’s possible to integrate RingCentral and Figma with APIs via Pipedream.
Pricing: From $15/seat/month for Figma; $5/seat/month for FigJam. Free plan available for both.9
Visme is a content creation tool for designing professional-looking docs, presentations, infographics, and data visualizations. Teams and clients can collaborate in real-time by annotating and commenting on content, as well as brainstorming and planning with the whiteboarding tool.
You can add and track users in your teams, and set user permissions or roles for who can view, edit, or share documents. Share content via email, embed to your website or intranet, or send a private link with encryption and password protection.
The digital asset manager helps you to store and organize all your brand assets in one central place, and you can schedule and publish all your social media posts and content tasks from a single shared calendar so everyone can see what’s been done.
Pricing: Free plan; prices start at $12.25/month.10
Ready to start choosing your collaboration software?
With a communication system underpinning your team collaboration efforts, you can start choosing the business collaboration softwarethat keeps teams on the same page.
Once you’ve created an efficient collaboration hub customized to your needs, everyone will be empowered to share ideas and information—no matter where they work.
View a free demo to find out more about how RingCentral can help you collaborate effectively.
Collaboration software FAQs
What does team collaboration mean?
Team collaboration means that all the members of a team, a department, or an entire organization are working together on a shared task or project—or toward a shared goal.
They use their combined skills and knowledge to create something new or to solve a problem together. By working effectively as a team, they can get things done faster with fewer resources than if they worked as individuals.
How do I choose a team collaboration tool?
The tools you choose will depend on your industry and your business processes, but there’s something out there to suit everyone. Consider the current state of collaboration in your company, and the problems or bottlenecks you want the software to fix.
Look for a solution that gives you the functionality you need right now, but with the ability to upgrade as your business grows. It’s best to find tools that integrate well with your communications system, so that teams can easily ask questions and keep each other updated on projects.
Make sure you do the research and take advantage of demos or free trials before you commit to a solution.
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