In today’s fast-paced, 24/7 global work environment, it’s vital to promote a clear understanding among your team members to prevent miscommunication.
As more and more business leaders recruit remote workers, it’s never been more critical to break down team silos and adopt a company-wide collaboration tool that offers an open, connected platform for employees to share and flow information freely, receive updates, communicate with each other and more.
Overview of Confluence
One helpful tool, Confluence, serves as a team collaboration software that offers a team workspace for everyone working on a project to work together and share updates and information efficiently and effectively. From quarterly planning documents to new hire blogs, companies can organize everything in a single place. And the biggest advantage: it can reduce communication gaps and save time.
Another advantage of utilizing team collaboration software is that it helps all departments and teams to organize, share and engage with each other about tasks and projects. For example, Confluence serves as a one-stop solution to make all content or information accessible to everyone. The software is offered either via subscription-based, hosted on the Cloud, or can be self-hosted on in-house servers or Confluence Data Centers.
5 Alternative Vendors
While Confluence can be used for teams of any size and type, from those with mission-critical, high-stakes projects to those that are looking for a space to cultivate team culture and engage with one another more authentically, in many scenarios, you may need features the application simply doesn’t offer.
If this is the case, there are numerous Confluence software alternatives available on the market today. Here are five alternative vendors:
Quip
Quip is a project management and task collaboration software that brings documents, spreadsheets, checklists, presentation slides and chat together in one tool. Quip is tightly integrated with Salesforce and serves as an ideal Confluence alternative for large-scale teams. While Quip has a higher price tag than its competitors, it can replace Confluence as well as Google Drive, Slack and other collaboration tools – which ultimately saves money and time. Keep in mind that adopting this software can come with a bit of a learning curve, so carve out ample time to evaluate it with your team to ensure everyone is on board.
Basecamp
Similar to Quip, Basecamp serves as a single, all-in-one collaboration tool, bringing together tasks, message boards, documents, calendars and much more around a single project. It can serve as your team’s central collaboration hub and stands out from the crowd when it comes to fully remote organizations. In fact, the Basecamp team was one of the trailblazers of remote work and integrated the team’s personal experiences and discoveries into the development of their tool.
ClickMeeting
As a web conferencing software, ClickMeeting engages employees and users and offers a “room” to facilitate team collaboration and engagement. The software supports web conferencing to allow teams to communicate face-to-face (virtually, that is), and the program also provides a platform for online training and courses – so trainers can create instructional videos that everyone on the team can access 24/7. And while other messaging apps give you the option to talk to someone virtually, they don’t often have the business capabilities that can help with efficient collaboration – this software aims to fill that need. It can also be integrated with numerous other business solutions, including Salesforce, Google Calendar, HubSpot and PipeDrive.
ProofHub
Geared towards teams looking to house all of their project management tools under one tool, ProofHub helps users plan projects with team members via interactive kanban boards and Gantt charts. The app allows you to communicate with others about specific projects and lets you manage tasks, events and due dates.
Jive
Self-proclaimed as the “world’s leading intranet and collaboration platform,” Jive gives companies the ability to allow their teams to communicate through messages, news feeds and blogs, as well as to collaborate around files, tasks, documents and discussions. The digital tool also comes with features for social networking, community analysis and employee engagement.
Top Features of Collaboration Software
Collaboration software can increase your company’s overall productivity – it gives you the opportunity to monitor and manage the tasks your team implements in real-time via social or mobile platforms.
Additionally, you can communicate within the software with various teams via audio or video conference to better understand what is taking specific employees too long or preventing them from producing what you need. Ultimately, the digital tool facilitates efficient communication company-wide.
Online collaboration tools also help foster better relationships between your employees. Instead of simply reading typical emails from each other, they can share data more efficiently using the software. As a result, their interactions and engagement will improve.
Most digital collaboration tools include the following features:
- Document management
- Social networking
- Task management
- Cloud storage
- Whiteboards
- Video and audio conferencing
- Smooth user interface from any device
- Robust security
How to Choose the Best Collaboration Software
When deciding which digital tool to adopt for your company, keep in mind that collaboration software should lend a helping hand (not be a hindrance). After reviewing the following factors, test your top platform choices for performance first-hand before signing on the dotted line.
- Decide what your organization is trying to accomplish. For example, are you looking to strengthen the culture? Improve your overall company? Save time and money?
- Is it integration-friendly? Research alternative options that offer hassle-free integration. For instance, integration should allow all media to be kept in your organization’s preferred storage system, like Dropbox or Google Drive.
- Robust vendor support. No matter what size or type of company you operate, tech support is sometimes par for the course. You can prevent IT-related delays by selecting a vendor that provides customer support within 24 hours. Top vendors also offer thorough troubleshooting chatbots and tutorials for basic issues and handle all maintenance and upgrades for clients for free.
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