How to begin with Online Collaboration in Quarantine?
Amidst this quarantine season due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the consequent lockdowns across the globe, don’t miss out the details while working on a team project. Here is the list of some useful online collaboration platforms and important tools that will help you and your team collaborate better while staying at your home. Share ideas and suggestions and do quick meet-ups to discuss even the smallest details and bring the best out of this work from home chance.
Google Docs
Google Docs is a great online service that allows you to work on documents, spreadsheets and presentations for free. With its sharing feature, Google Docs is also a cool collaborative tool for any written project that involves more than a person to work upon. It also lets you track changes by saving multiple versions of a document with different names. Moreover, it allows access based link sharing and easy integration with various other platforms for easy content curation and sharability.
Comments are another interesting feature in the Google Docs. Adding comments in Google Docs is a useful way to add notes, suggestions, or questions for other collaborators in the document.
Learn to use Google Docs:
GitHub
GitHub is an online cloud-based platform for developers needs no introduction. Apart from version control, it is extremely useful for online collaboration. It allows software developers to store, manage, and reuse their code. Now available both as an android application and website.
Learn to use git and GitHub:
Also, read this article that demystifies the common confusions in the git terminology:
Trello
Trello is like your digital whiteboard where you can create, assign, check and mark the tasks for your team. It has a user-friendly environment, where you can create boards and on every board, you can create cards to list out your To-Dos and then cross out each task once it’s been completed. Trello offers integration with several other platforms including, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, OneDrive, Slack and the list goes on.
Available both as an android and web application.
Learn to use Trello:
Slack
Slack is a communication-based tool which allows sending direct messages, files, code snippets, images, to your colleagues or team-mates, either in groups or individually. You can easily organize every department by creating its channel and by adding all of its members in the channel. For instance, you have the main channel with all members, then a channel where your designers collaborate and another one where the marketing team collaborates.
Slack also allows pinning messages to different channels and integration with Google Drive, Trello, GitHub etc. Putting simply, it’s like your whole office put into a virtual workspace.
Learn to use Slack:
CodeShare.io
CodeShare.io is an online Code Sharing tool that allows you to write or copy code, then share it with friends and colleagues, pair programming and troubleshoot together. It’s free and allows real-time code editing, first pay product is for conducting interviews. Usually used for conducting in-depth technical interviews, teaching and for troubleshooting issues. Companies or individuals can create a real-time code editor with video chat options where participants can talk face to face and work in a professional scenario.
CodeSandbox
CodeSandbox is another online code editor to the ease the job of the web developers. It can be used to share snippets of code as URLs with your team with added features for automating things like transpiling, bundling and dependency management. It also has a live preview feature that can be used to see the live output of the code as you type alongside. The editor works with all javascript projects, but it has some React specific features, like the ability to download the project in a create-react-app template and supports NPM dependencies by creating a dependency build on the fly for the specific combination of dependencies.
Moreover, it also has Prettify on saving enabled by default because this ensures the same style between sandboxes and makes it easier to read the code of other sandboxes.
Learn what is CodeSandbox:
Pastebin
Pastebin is a text storage site or a type of online content hosting service where users can store plain text, e.g. to source code snippets for code review. Once the text has been uploaded to a Pastebin, other users can edit. Each upload has its URL, which users share through IRC, programming-related forums, or other online venues such as Facebook or Twitter.
Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts is the online video conferencing solution from Google that can accommodate multiple users video calling each other natively from their computer browser. It is aimed at businesses of all sizes for their collaboration and communication needs. Meanwhile, it also allows easy integration with all G Suite products and can be used for sharing screens, online presentations, live streaming, video recording and a lot more. Thus, it has all the functionalities you would expect from a workplace instant messaging software.
Learn to use Hangouts:
Zoom
Video calls can always make remote workdays feel more connected. Zoom is another amazing video conferencing tool, usually used for online meetings and webinars by most of the companies worldwide. It’s the best in the field because of its free account policy for the basic plans. Zoom is packed with a lot of over the top features like recording option such that the meetings are available to later as well while providing fast and clear audio and video experience.
Learn to use Zoom meetings:
That’s everything you need to know to begin with online collaboration with your friends and colleagues on your team projects. So, get started, stay home, stay safe and communicate using these amazing collaboration platforms and be productive this quarantine season.
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