Let's Collaborate - Mike Grossman Consulting

Let's Collaborate - Mike Grossman Consulting - Newsletter, October 2018

Published: Thu, 10/25/18

When working with clients, large and small, we often find it's useful to use free software that enables collaboration.

Software for file sharing, telephone/video conferencing, task management and screen sharing are just some of the tools we use.

While we do suggest using certain software products, if our client favors an alternative product we will happily use that instead.

Here's a peek at some of the tools we use to collaborate and get work done.

Easy File Sharing

Dropbox is a free service that allows you to put your files in a shared folder on your computer and share those files with your team. You also have access to all of your shared documents on the Dropbox website. (Often referred to as "cloud storage".) This is very useful if you're sharing large files (too big for email) and working on shared documents. The free tier of Dropbox only offers storage up to 2 GB so the first paid tier is a good option at $9.99 / month for 1 TB.

Dropbox Alternative: Google Drive. It's integrated across the platform so if you're already in the Google Universe, using Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc., you'll find Google Drive very convenient. Premium versions of Google Drive are available including $9.99 / month for 1 TB.

Conference With Your Team via Phone and Video

FreeConferenceCall.com is a free service that allows multiple people to dial into a shared line via phone or computer. It's easy to host a call and email invites to participants. Also, when video conferencing, there is a screen share option which is very useful. The free version also includes recording audio from the call.

Free Conference Call Alternative: Zoom. Also free, Zoom is very similar to Free Conference Call. It's worth trying out both to see which you prefer.

Share Tasks, Improve Collaboration

Trello is a free tool that lets you create different projects and create tasks related to that project. Once you've created tasks you can assign them to team members, add notes and give the tasks due dates. Trello's layout is very helpful when there are lots of tasks involved in a project and you want to see everything at once and not forget important items. This is the digital version of putting Post-It notes on a white board.

Trello Alternative: Asana. Very similar to Trello in functionality but different visually. Both these products are great for collaboration and they do similar things so take a quick look at both and decide which is easiest to use yourself. Premium versions of Trello and Asana are available and offer more features.

Share What You're Looking At

It's often necessary to take a screen grab of your browser window and share it with someone on your team. If you use the Chrome browser then you're in luck. This free Chrome browser plugin is one of my favorite collaboration tools.

The icon resides in your menu bar (upper right-hand corner of Chrome) and with a click your entire window gets captured (including scrolling down to the bottom of the page). You can download the screen grab as an image file .jpg or pdf.

Full Page Screen Capture Alternative: Try this "old school" way of doing screen grabs on Windows and Mac computers:

Windows, To take a screen grab press the Ctrl+PrtScn keys and then open a graphics program or word processing program and press Ctrl+V to paste.

Mac, To take a screen grab press the Command+Control+Shift+3 keys and then open a graphics program or word processing program and press Command+V to paste.

I'd love to hear your experiences with these tools. Just hit "reply" and let me know what you think. Thanks!

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