Recently I have started a new adventure. I became an independent marketer of iLearningGlobal. You can read more about iLearningGlobal on my other blog, which you can find here >>. Due to this initiative I started communicating, collaborating, and exchanging files with business partners across the world. Since there was no company setting to cover for this, we found tools online which were free and effective in use. Please find a list of my favorites below.
Google Groups
Google provides a number of great free tools that are all integrated and accessible with the same login as your Gmail account. Once you create a group, you can invite people to it and then share files, create rich customized pages, and start discussions to which all group members can leave comments. It is simple and easy to use.
Box
Box.net provides you with 1Gb of free cloud storage. You create a folder structure, upload files, and also invite other people to collaborate with you in viewing and changing those files. A nice feature is also that for each file you can also just select the URL link and send it to people so they can download your file. It beats sending large files over Email or Skype.
DropBox
Dropbox also falls in the cloud storage category and shares all the features as Box. The difference is however that Dropbox installs a program on your comupter so that you don’t have to upload files to it. You simply drag and drop them into a Public folder on your computer that Dropbox creates for you. So you simply manage Dropbox with your own Windows Explorer for example. Dropbox gives 2Gb free, with the option of increasing to 5Gb if you invite some friends to use it as well.
DimDim
If in certain cases you don’t want to share files with other people, and would like to simply hold a presentation for them, a presentation in which they can actively participate and also view your screen, e.g. the powerpoint presentation on your screen; then you can use DimDim. It is a free conferencing or webinar tool basically.
Teambox
Finally, there is also Teambox, another open-source web-based tool that offers project managing capabilities. Its community/collaboration services include a dashboard where you can see the recent activity of your projects, tasks, calendar, notes, pages, a chat room, fast and easy file-uploads, and interactive drag & drop capability.
I hope you find some of these free tools useful. If you have some great online resources yourself, I’d love to know about it, just leave a comment below.
Thanks and regards,
Ajdin
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