10 Remote Collaboration Tools You Should Know About

Remote work is currently the only healthy work option for a lot of businesses, including startups. However, it's been an essential mode of business for many of us for years, and I've personally been working remotely with distributed teams in the United States, parts of Europe and even Asia for over four years. In this post, I will take you through the best tools I recommend for remote collaboration in different interesting remote work activities from project and time management to development and even design hand-offs, plus a lot more.

Project Management

Project management basically involves the creation, assignment and arrangement of tasks or deliverables of a particular project in boards and cards to the people responsible. Trello is one of the most intuitive list-making project management tools, where everyone can collaborate remotely—and it’s free. It has a very simple and intuitive user interface and comes with amazing social-media-like features. It is web-based, but is also available as a mobile app. I currently use it on an iOS device and it is amazing. Other project management products are Airtable, Basecamp and Asana.

Design Collaboration

Your product designers, graphic designers, product managers and frontend developers also need to collaborate as they have always been doing at the office. There is a need for a design tool that fosters sharing of work, and ensures that the hand-off process is seamless. Unite UX is the tool to use to bridge the gap between your design team and your development team. Create responsive applications from your Sketch designs with an intuitive round-trip workflow. Unite UX is created and backed by Progress, trusted by over 140,000 application development teams worldwide.

Team Communication

Now that everyone works from home, remote communication is no longer optional—it's essential. You and members of your team need communication tools dedicated to work and devoid of distraction to help you keep track of things and handle check-ins and other office admin business through chats. Slack is a great free solution where instant messaging can be done remotely in a work environment with channels that can be arranged as departments or groups. Slack also has an API you can consume to create bots to help automate or handle tasks like reminders, conduct voting or even schedule messages ensuring that employees stay engaged.

Documentation

Video Conferencing

Storage Service in the Cloud

Customer Support

You can be in the category of people who are still serving customers’ needs even though you are doing so from the comfort of your home. There is a need for a tool you can use to manage your customer support team, and that is where Groove comes in. With Groove you can manage your customer support team, comment on an ongoing customer support ticket or thread (that the customer can’t see), assign tickets to team members easily and get a report of the support team as a whole all in one place.

Time Zone Management

Your team members might be living in different locations geographically and so you might also have to worry about time differences from one country to another. This will require you find a way to manage the time zone differences properly and still ensure that all work is done when due and meetings happen on time. World Time Buddy is a great service that lets you manage up to four different time zones for free. The slider is such a cool feature, as you never have to miss accurate times again when scheduling meetings or deadlines.

Git and Product Development

Code Sharing

Conclusion

These are a few interesting realities you need to consider, plan toward and solve for as your team members work from home.