Being a freelance web developer with virtual teams of designers, programmers and marketers, it’s absolutely imperative for me to have effective collaboration tools in place for my team to be able to communicate ideas easily.

Having attempted to do this over email, I quickly realised that managing the large volumes of emails bouncing between each other was sometimes as challenging as the projects.

Since then, we adopted various different communications platforms to make things easier.

Google Docs

Google Docs is an underrated online app, and is a lot more than just an office suite. It allows you to add other users and editors. Allowing several members to work on a single document live, you can even see text appearing on the document; in real time, as the other user is typing. The highlight changes feature allows you to view all additions and edits step by step, you can even read deleted segments that have been removed by another user, which is useful for reference.

While it may not have all the features of Word 2010, the collaboration aspect makes it an ideal tool to use for documents and spreadsheet that require team participation; I even use it with clients in order to nail down specifications.

Vyew

I’ve worked with numerous clients from different cities and countries where face to face meetings weren’t possible, which was a problem because clients often want a meeting with the developers before signing contracts, web conferencing is a useful method and I use Vyew. Being a freelancer, keeping costs down is imperative; Vyew has a free ad supported version with a 10 user limit. The ad free version costs $9.95 per month which might be advisable for users where presenting a professional image is important.

Vyew allows you to present using voice and powerpoint slides, it has a useful desktop sharing functionality which allows you to show live demonstrations such as work in progress. Additionally it has useful project collaboration tools allowing you to annotate images using voice or text, although I prefer to use Google Docs for all collaboration work as Google Docs is far more accessible.

Dropbox

Being is so widely adopted by graphic designers, that it amazes me when I come across designers who don’t use it.

Dropbox takes the hassle out of synchronising my documents across my computers; it allows me to create and begin writing on my macbook, then walk away and resume writing on my desktop PC; without even thinking about transferring file across, because Dropbox does that automatically.

The best feature of all is the ability to share folders with other Dropbox users, and even create download links for non Dropbox users.

This is handy because numerous email providers limit attachment size, and emailing large files back and forth can fill up your email inbox very quickly.

Dropbox is one of the more highly regarded backup providers out there, however there are numerous top rated services out there, many are listed on the online backup reviews site.