Apps: Team It Up

On The Board
Trello is available on the web, with a Chrome extension, on iOS and Android. It's a project management tool aimed at helping you organise your life, much like Evernote does, I suppose. But it's based on the visually attractive concept of boards and cards. In Trello, a board can be a project to which you invite members from your team, collaborating with you. You can have as many boards as you want. You can colour-code them.

Within each board, you create cards which will contain anything from pictures to links to notes. You drag team members to those cards to link their responsibility to whatever's on the card. They can be moved around and archived when done. It takes the tedium out of planning and thinking because it's so visual.

Cut The Slack
Slack is a very widely used collaboration tool, again, available on the web and apps on all platforms. Slack let's you organise your team conversations in open channels. Make a channel for a project, a topic, or anything and everyone has a transparent view of all that’s going on. For sensitive information, create private channels and invite a few team members.You can also reach team members directly. There are some features for which you go into a paid version, depending on the number of people who will use it.

It's a tool for today's "social enterprise" which is an idea dreamt of for many years but which people didn't know how to implement until tools like Slack came along. With Slack, you can share files — just drag and drop — and add comments to things like PDFs and spreadsheets. You can also link to online storage services.

It's Quite Asana
A simple collaborative platform, Asana, is again available via apps and the web. However, it is more to-do list based. A team can create their workspace, based on a project they're doing together. Within each project, you create tasks and tag them, attaching files, comments and notes.

For all its apparent simplicity, Asana is a full-fledged project management and collaboration platform and also has a pricing structure based on whether advanced features and multiple users are needed, though it's free for groups of less than 15 members. They can talk, ask questions, and discuss the project they're working on as they track completion together. It's described as teamwork without the email. As they work, team members can get updates on progress.