Real time collaboration software

Real-time collaboration is a technology which, sometimes, is absolutely necessary for supporting and promoting team-based co-working approaches to save business time, to increase productivity, and to strengthen the quality of team deliverables. Real-time collaboration tool is a computer-based instrument supporting and promoting working interrelations between multiple people who need to establish any kind of data sharing over their corporate network or via Internet (sharing documents, files, project issues, etc). This article is dedicated to consideration of technologies and business benefits produced by such software.

Why to use realtime collaboration software for project and work management?

There are different attractive benefits that can be obtained through using realtime collaboration tools in project management. Basically, effective real-time collaboration tool can guarantee the following advantages:

• When using realtime collaboration software, all your team members (their number doesn’t really matter) are engaged to work within the same environment where they have to obey some common rules and standards, without any mismanagement in these questions (shared terms, shared tools, shared objectives, and shared approaches).
• When using realtime collaboration tools, your teammates are allowed with the shared access to the same informational source (a database), so that each of them is perfectly aware of what the latest updates and modifications embrace, as well as they get an ability to navigate easily within a shared databank of consistent and integral information where any required details can be retrieved as if all the teammates were using the same computer.
• When using a real-time collaboration tool, a team manager gets a weighty benefit meaning that he can leverage and supervise all the events, tasks and processes taking place within his subordinated workgroup, obtaining real-time control over all the essential project matters (costs, time, budget, HR, etc).

• When using real time collaboration software, you can make all your teammates feeling themselves joint as if they were a sport team pursuing a win together, as due to real-time capabilities they are reliably teamed up by connection to the shared objectives and are directed by the common management.

What types of real time collaboration software are available?

Basically, there two types – on-line (Internet-based) and desktop (LAN-based).

• Real time collaboration Excel (MS) – This application is highly popular and used in the slump of companies and industries due to its agile possibilities (it can be perfectly used to manage finances, statistics, checklists, forecasting, etc). While this program can work just excellent as a spreadsheet tool, its collaborative capabilities are quite poor (in order to make them better you need to install Sharepoint real time collaboration module that comes for free when you buy MS Server). Besides this, they provide Microsoft online realtime collaboration platforms for sharing documents such as Office Groove and Office Live (Microsoft Office real time collaboration).
• Google docs real time collaboration – this Internet giant has its own on-line system for sharing documented information. Google’s solution is free and quite poorly functioned (as in managing documents it is similar to WordPad’s functionality). These “Google docs” can be used without problems just if rich functionality is not a critical need for you – as if you had to share just some quick notes with a small number of remote teammates.
• Open source real time collaboration software – there are a lot of on-line and desktop platforms providing you with possibility to modify its program code, to develop your own solutions. They can provide users with quite wide opportunities for tuning their basic versions to create systems suiting the most sophisticated requirements that you can ever dream of. Creating such complicated multi-level corporate systems is a task for big and rich companies with powerful IT staffs.

Specific example of real time collaboration software for project management in SME:

VIP Task Manager is a multiuser system that workgroups and small teams can use to work together dynamically and effectively without having any troubles with complicated IT-wise installations or making costly purchases of additional software modules. It is very simple in mastering and use, but it has a quite rich functionality yet. This software will help you to plan, share, assign, control and report your business tasks explained in a variety of different matters such as time, costs, priorities, etc.