“Hello, who’s on the call? Let’s collaborate!”

A lot has been written about on-line collaboration and meeting tools….what works best for you?

A few things to consider:

• What is your business profile? Do you work in a large, small or medium enterprise?
• Are you an independent consultant or remote worker?
• Do you need to bring people/resources together frequently, or occasionally?
• Are you willing to pay a premium or is free service (while basic) acceptable?
• Are the people you interact with globally located?
• Do you need to share documents frequently?
• Does your interaction/collaboration require technical troubleshooting – meaning you may need to access your client’s desktop?
• Do you need recording capability?
• Is video important?
• Do you want an integrated system that works with your calendar?
• Do you need to support multiple platforms?
• Do you need to support robustness of different infrastructure environments where quality of network may be an issue?
• Do you want the ability to “chat” while online/during the collaboration interaction?
• Do you want to control features such as “mute” callers, security passcodes, recording etc.?

Once you’ve assessed your needs and prioritized the capabilities that are most important to you, the next step is to research which collaboration tools are available and narrow down the best options.

One place to start may be to evaluate side-by-side a “free” service vs. a “paid for service”. This can help you quickly eliminate whether or not you’re willing to pay for higher value based on the capabilities you need.  If you are in a medium or large enterprise, chances are you are already using the company’s own platform and you likely wouldn’t have the opportunity to go “outside” the corporate standard.

Here are a few on-line collaboration tools and applications I’ve used.  The various capabilities that serve me well depending on the client, geographic needs, quality of network service and feature rich capabilities:

1. Go to Meeting: https://www.gotomeeting.com/fec/
2. Join.me: https://join.me/
3. Logmein: https://secure.logmein.com/
4. Webex: http://www.webex.com/
5. Skype: http://www.skype.com/en/

I’d be interested in knowing which collaboration tools have worked for you, or those that haven’t and why?