Setting Up Instant Collaboration Quickly and Easily: Final Recap

As I've reviewed each of the tools that you can use to set up quick and easy collaboration with your family, project team, or small business; let's recap how everything fits and works together to give you a complete solution for absolutely no money out of your pocket.

Why Is Collaboration Important?

You may be wondering why you would even care to think about collaboration.  Yet, collaboration is part of our everyday lives.  If you work in an office, chances are you meet in conference rooms, use email, and never let your iPhone, Blackberry or Android leave your side.

These are all tools that are used to collaborate, communicate and share ideas and information. In this day and age, it's now even easier than ever to collaborate by way of communicating and sharing information that's important between only you and your group, and you don't even have to be in the same physical location.  This is a huge step in the evolution of technology and collaboration.

Quite simply, online collaboration enables you to share and communicate in a simple fashion, yet, with ultimate flexibility as to how you do it.  And, most of all, you can share with only those you want to share with.  This is quite unlike "Social Media" where everyone is in on the fun.  In the case of these collaboration tools, you can share with only your family members or work group, so that you can still have a sense of privacy over your content.

Let's Recap The Tools

In recapping the tools I was able able to share with you on setting up collaboration quickly and easily, let's look at what they are and how they can benefit you very briefly.  I'll also provide a link back to that article itself so you can get more detail as to how it can be super-useful for you.

Gmail:  Google's answer to email, Gmail takes email to another level with several useful features that go beyond simple email.  Gmail is also a powerful conerstone to Google's collaboration-friendly services.  And like all the services highlighted in this series, it's free, it's powerful, and they have some rockin' anti-spam features that I think you'd really like.

Here's the link to the article in this series on Gmail: http://www.helpfuladvisor.com/2011/12/how-to-set-up-instant-collaboration.html

And here's a link to another article I wrote called 10 Reasons I Love Gmail, and Why You Can, Too.

Google Calendar:  Anyone who uses Outlook knows how powerful an integrated calendar with your email can be to your daily life.  Smartphone users can also have their calendars handy wherever they go.  Google has created an integrated yet separated calendaring solution called Google Calendar.

It's great feature is the ability to quickly and easily share calendars, control how much information others can see about your appointments, and you can even create a common calendar for your family or project team that allows everyone to by in sync for dates and times. Plus, it's a great single-person calendar, too.

Here's the link the article in this series on Google Calendar: http://www.helpfuladvisor.com/2011/12/setting-up-instant-collaboration.html

Google Docs: Google Docs is not just a word processing program.  It's an entire suite of productivity tools that are free to use, and everything you create can be stored in the cloud and accessible anywhere you have an Internet connection.

What's more, you can share your documents with anyone you choose, with just a couple of super-easy clicks.  If you're working with someone on the same document, you can see each other's changes instantly right before your very eyes.  No need to re-save and refresh to see any changes, it's all happening instantly.

While perhaps not as powerful as say, Microsoft Office, Google is making improvements and enhancements quite regularly to make it the best suite money can't buy (it's free!).  And let's not overlook the fact that you can import MS Word docs, Excel Spreadsheets, and even PDFs into Google Docs.  Plus, you can export them to the format of your choosing, including MS Office, so you're not crippled in any way by using this suite of collaboration-ready applications.

Here's the link to the article in the series on Google Docs: http://www.helpfuladvisor.com/2011/12/setting-up-instant-collaboration_06.html

Google Talk: I think Google is not far away from renaming this application to Google Chat.  It's name can be a bit confusing, but essentially it's a text and voice chat system.  It ties in with Gmail, so you can chat directly from your browser without having to install any software, or you can install their software and run it on your computer as a separate app.

What's more, if you install a quick and simple browser plugin, you can do video chats from your Google Talk sessions within your Gmail.  Person to person voice chat is also enabled right out of the box, so you can also go voice instead of typing your fingers to the bone.

All in all, it's a handy app that lets you type, talk, or video, as well as send files through the system to your single contact or a group of contacts in a group session.

Here's the link to the article in the series on Google Talk: http://www.helpfuladvisor.com/2011/12/setting-up-collaboration-quickly-and.html

Google+: While some call this service "Google's Facebook", I still see positive differences between this and Facebook itself.  What's most pertinent to this discussion is that I feel Google+ is geared more toward collaboration than Facebook.  While Facebook may be great for hanging around and reading about people's every minute detail in life, Google+ can truly be used as a meeting place for group video conferences, sharing documents and photos, and quick updates and status that is project related.

I just think that Google made separating and segregating your media into "circles" so easy, that only the people you want to have see certain information see it.  That's great for family and business collaboration scenarios.  Yes, I know it's possible to do on Facebook, but frankly, it's a pain in the neck to do.

Here's the link to the article in series on Google+: http://www.helpfuladvisor.com/2011/12/setting-up-instant-collaboration_13.html

Google Groups:  This is perhaps my most favorite tool for collaboration.  It's flexible, it's easy to set up and use, and it can make sharing content and ideas so freakin' easy!  The real power of Google Groups is how it will take your one message and re-distribute it to hundreds if not thousands of group members.

While most people send a mass email message (not spam, but legitimate mails) by putting everyone's name in their To: or CC: or BCC: fields, it can take forever to send one message to a group of your contacts.

Google Groups makes this brain-dead easy while also saving your email program and server from a total meltdown.  Once your group is set up and you have members of your group ready for your message, you can send an email to one single address: your Google Group's email address, then the magic begins.

Your Google Group will take that one message you sent to it, and will redistribute it to all of the group's members email addresses within seconds!  Some public groups have over 100,000 members in them, and sending to all of them is as simple as sending an email to one person only, the group's single email address.  Then Google's servers do the rest of the heavy lifting by sending that email to all the members, in your name.

You can send beautifully formatted messages, even send attachments to the group.  You can also enable your group to allow any member or just some members to also send messages to all the group's members.  This can make "reply to all" a thing of the past.  Why make your email program do all the work and slow down your computer?  Google Groups can truly make it easy for you to keep in touch with a group of any size.  Is it any wonder I'm so excited about this tool?

Here's the link to the article in the series on Google Groups: http://www.helpfuladvisor.com/2011/12/setting-up-instant-collaboration_15.html

Collaboration Doesn't Have To Be Complicated

My hope is that by reading this series on quick and easy collaboration, you've discovered that collaboration, communication, and sharing of media within a specific group doesn't have to be overly complicated or even expensive.  Let the big companies go through the headache and expense of putting in complex solutions that may or may not work and may or may not be a pain for you to have to learn how to use.

All you have to do is sign up for a Google Account, and let their services do the hard work for you.  All you have to do is use it.

And, hopefully you found this entire series to be helpful to you in some way.  Perhaps it saved you some time, some money, or even some headache on how to quickly get information to a large or small team.  Or better yet, maybe this might have solved your dilemma on how to plan that huge family reunion.  Either way, if you found this to be useful and helpful, please pass this to someone else and help them out.

They'll be glad you did!  Thanks for reading, stay in touch.

Image Credit: Flickr/MrTopf