Digital tools that support and facilitate everyday work in the office have been around for a long time. However, due to the current situation in the wake of the corona crisis, numerous companies and thus employees are forced to use them more as they work from home. This begins with team communication, often across departments, because the mere exchanging emails is often not sufficient. The distribution of tasks and self-organization also require new techniques, because person-to-person coordination is made more difficult if every employee is working from home.

So-called collab office tools are the “winners” of the corona crisis and are currently seeing a huge demand: Whether it’s to maintain communication outside of the office in your own home, or to get yourself and a team organized and ultimately guarantee normal work operations. We put together a selection of helpful tools, some of which are available free of charge or were more recently made free of charge due to the corona crisis.

Digital Communication

In addition to ©Skype, the classic messaging provider whose functionality is comparatively limited, there are numerous sophisticated communication and collaboration tools. As part of Office 365, the ©Microsoft Teams platform combines the chat, groups, calendar, calls, and file transfer and is free until January 2021. The focus is on communication within the company and on the individual teams. Microsoft Teams supports Skype video calls as well as access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Microsoft believes that more teams should currently be doing their work without direct contact to protect themselves from infection with the coronavirus. Therefore, no user fees are currently charged. Shortly after the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 in mid-March 2020, the number of users of Microsoft Teams rose rapidly: from just 32 million within a week to 44 million users worldwide.

Despite the criticism due to data leaks, the free ©Zoom Cloud Meetings platform, which was specially developed for companies and their communication via video, has also enjoyed great popularity since the outbreak of the crisis. Last year, around 10 million meetings were held daily and since the beginning of the corona crisis, there have been more than 200 million daily. With the cloud-based video conference solution, video meetings, audio conferences, webinars, and live chats can be held with extensive functions. For example, the moderator’s screen can be shared to show more content and there is also an integrated whiteboard.

Adobe also offers a comprehensive solution for communication and exchange, especially for larger groups, such as company training or school classes, with ©Adobe Connect. Participants work interactively in virtual classrooms and chat, videos, and documents can be integrated as different kinds of windows. For now until May 31, 2020, Adobe is offering it to schools and universities free of charge.

Project management at home

©Trello is considered the top dog for basic needs among the free project management tools. It is based on the Kanban method, according to which each project or task is visualized in the form of a blackboard. It can then be supplemented with different kinds of information, assigned to individual team members, and flexibly moved. This creates an interactive overview of the individual tasks currently pending and their progress within the project.

©Asana offers more extensive project management features. The basic Kanban-based structure is similar to Trello, but there are more features for designing the individual tasks. In addition, a calendar and a time management system are integrated and the individual project processes can be created and reused. Asana is particularly suitable for larger companies with multiple teams, whereas Trello is better suited for smaller groups or individuals.

The complete cloud-based ©Google G-Suite solution combines Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms and Google Hangouts. All sections of a project are reproduced interactively online free of charge: from creating and editing texts, lists, and presentations, to saving files and communicating via email, chat, or video. The functionality is not necessarily extensive, but it is enough for common processes.

Teamwork outside the office

If you want to save and edit interesting websites, files, and notes in a central location, share them with the team, and use them for projects, ©Evernote is the right choice. Any information, for example resulting from online research, can be transferred to the tool in central location, stored there, and then is available for use. What’s special about Evernote is that it can be integrated into numerous other applications, such as Google Drive and Outlook. The basic version of the application is free.

©Nextcloud is also suitable for sharing and editing documents with other team members. Users can set up their own file server in order to exchange files or work directly on joint projects. The tool is designed so that you can synchronize local directories on your own PC with a copy on the server.

©MindMeister is a suitable program for sharing and working on ideas in the brainstorming phase. Based on the mind mapping method, ideas are recorded, structured, and visualized; either on a team or alone, and online at that. Notes, pictures, and videos can also be added. The tool is free for one person, but not for several people as a team.

There are those who are saying that the corona crisis is giving an enormous boost to digitalization. Because many a CEO and CIO are now aware of where there were weak points previously in terms of the digital transformation. The market for digital tools is huge and we can only hope that even after the crisis has passed, interest and usage will be just as strong, or better, even stronger.