Tech Tools for Collaborative Offices

Stay on top of projects with easily shared documents and calendars If you work in a collaborative office environment, passing documents back and forth via email or staying up to date on the status of a project can lead to confusion or errors if not managed efficiently. This is where technology tools can save the day. Especially in the era of cloud storage, it can be really easy for multiple team members to collaborate on a project without creating redundant files or losing track of the most recent updates. Share Calendars. In a collaborative office, you need to track tasks you are doing both as an individual and as a group. To that end, it's helpful to have a shared calendar. In a small environment a paper-based calendar or white board might be enough, but increasingly it's much easier to have an electronic calendar. The benefit of using calendar software is that they are really easy to share with multiple people. Google Calendar is a really great free online calendar. For Mac users, iCal is another great choice. Outlook Calendars can be shared among Microsoft Outlook users, too. There are also other web-based calendars like Huddle.com, which allows you to create multiple calendars for different projects, assign tasks to specific team members, and manage a customized master calendar that applies to each unique individual's duties.

Share Documents. Another helpful tech tool for collaborative offices is being able to share documents. If there is something that is being created that you want other people on your team to see or edit, try using Google Docs, Microsoft's Office 365, or iCloud on the Mac, so that you can easily share documents amongst multiple people. Share Audio and Video. If your office is audio-visually inclined, there are a lot of devices that can help you share movies, music, or photos. You can get an Apple TV that lets you stream things from your other computers; you can use a Netflix box that lets you stream things from different devices around your office; you can use a Sonox which lets you stream music; you can use a dedicated Mediasmart bio server. There are some that are made by Iomega and Hewlett Packard, and they are not that expensive. One terabyte of storage--that holds a lot of movies, music, and photos--costs around $150. That is a device that connects to your network that lets you stream things amongst all of your computers. By streaming these things it cuts down on a lot of clutter, so rather than having CDs or DVDs scattered around office desks, it can all be collected onto one drive or one computer that you can then access from different devices


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Joshua Zerkel, Productivity Strategist, is a Certified Professional Organizer® and the founder of Custom Living Solutions, the San Francisco Bay Area's premier productivity and organizing consulting firm. Joshua specializes in helping busy entrepreneurs save time, be more productive and make more money by getting organized at home and at work. http://www.customlivingsolutions.com


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