Kristopher Welsh Sergios Charalambous

[email protected] [email protected]

School of Computing Medway Building Chatham Maritime Kent ME4 4AG

Online Collaboration Tools for Small/Medium Enterprises

Images are all Creative Commons Licensed, available on Flickr

What’s on the Menu Today? Working with Colleagues Remotely Videoconferencing with Skype Sharing Files with DropBox Collaborative Writing using Wikis Multi-Site Virtual Whiteboarding with Twiddla “Menu” - By vasta

Videoconferencing Some companies spend lots of money on expensive dedicated hardware, or on complex software solutions

There’s an obvious benefit to being able to hold meetings cross-site, in terms of time, travel and money. This supports home-working too

Most people have heard of Skype, but few realise how much is included for free

Free Functionality Instant Messaging With presence functionality, ability to send/receive files

Voice and Video Chat …but only on a 1:1 basis

Ability to show the other person your screen Handy when dealing with complex diagrams or documents that are already drafted… “Christmas presents” - By Sunfrog1

Paid Extras Ability to call POTS phones You can either pay ~£4 per month for unlimited calls, ~£3 for 400 minutes, or top-up like a PAYG mobile, & pay ~2p/minute

A set landline number that, when dialled, connects to you via skype You pick the area code

Costs approx £35 per year

Multi-way VideoConferencing Free if you take out either of the monthly subscriptions mentioned in the 1st bullet point.

Sharing Files with DropBox Lots of talk about “The Cloud” at the moment However, unless you’re running a datacentre, “the cloud” isn’t very interesting in and of itself

More interesting are the applications and services that are offered via cloud-based technologies, that were otherwise infeasible

One of the most useful is DropBox

DropBox – The Central Concept DropBox, when installed, designates a special folder on your computer as your dropbox

Any files/folders placed in here are automatically uploaded to their servers Any other computers/smarphone/tablet you have dropbox installed on will automatically download a copy The same thing happens whenever you modify a file…

Thus, DropBox is a synchronisation and backup tool all rolled into one…

DropBox – The Features Users can designate specific folders inside their dropbox as “Shared Folders” The other users the folder is shared with can modify/create files too, and the changes are mirrored everywhere

DropBox allows you to roll back to a previous version of your file, undoing changes. Old versions kept for 30 days on free accounts

“游泳可以嗎?!” - By sⓘndy°

Paid Extras Free Accounts start with just 2Gb, although extra free space for referrals: Additional Space 100Gb

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$10 per month or $100 per year

200Gb

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$20 per month or $200 per year

500Gb

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$50 per month or $500 per year

“Piggy Bank” - By Alan Cleaver

Collaborative Writing using Wikis This one is a little different… You don’t install a wiki onto your computer, you install one onto a web host (which you rent), and access it by typing the correct URL into your browser Demo URL: KITC wiki

“The Simplest Online Database That Could Possibly Work”

Ward Cunningham “Pink Sunset of My Dreams Free Creative Commons Waikiki Beach, Hawaii” - By Pink Sherbet Photography

Virtual Whiteboarding Some types of planning are best performed by jotting something down, sketching diagrams and talking things over This is what we use “normal” whiteboards for

Image Taken By Douglas Wray – acquired from: http://instagram.com/p/nm695/

Virtual Whiteboarding tries to recreate this type of interaction on a computer

Twiddla This is a relatively new website with a great team-based virtual whiteboarding service They call it a “No-setup, web-based meeting playground”

Can make drawings, write text, attach & annotate documents and pictures, text chat It’s also possible to do voice chat, but that’s temperamental

There are some extras available for $14/mo HTTPS (SSL) meetings, extra storage, passworded meetings

Wrapping Up We’ve shown you some of the collaboration tools that we use ourselves when working here at the University People working collaboratively across campuses, from home, from other countries & at other Universities As your business opens more sites or allows homeworking, you may find the business needs similar tools

All of the products we’ve shown have competitors, we’ve opted to show the ones we consider to be “tried and tested” – rather than because we’re recommending them specifically

All done!