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    5 Free Cloud-Based Document Collaboration Tools to Power Your Productivity

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      Entrepreneurs who work with clients across the globe and small businesses with workers in home offices and remote locations don’t miss a beat today with the proliferation of cloud based collaboration tools. Here are five FREE tools with editing and sharing capabilities.

      Evernote

      We’ve written about Evernote. Heck, we even did a Tech Tutorial video on the application. But it’s more than just a place to capture, store and organize information. Share a notebook by emailing team members, or post to Twitter and Facebook. I use Evernote daily .

      Google Docs

      Share online documents, presentations, and spreadsheet with Google Docs. Create a document and give your team, colleagues or clients access by inviting them via email. Multiple users can edit the document at the same time and it’s updated in real time. You can even append comments to a document. And this year, Google rolled out discussions within the document. Now you can easily tell who made a comment and when—with timestamps and profile pictures—and you can keep track of the conversation. I also use this application daily.

      MindMeister

      Another favorite of ours is MindMeister, a web-based mind-mapping tool. It gets the right brain involved in the collaboration process by visualizing your thoughts and ideas with maps. Create a map and share your creation by inviting team members by email, or with a unique, secure direct link. Like Google Apps, you can work simultaneously with the team on the same project and see changes as they happen.

      Trello

      I came across this new web-based application recently and signed up for a free account. it looks fantastic.

      Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. It tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. All your projects, all your tasks, all of your team–organized, accounted for, and easily visible at a glance.

      I’ll continue to explore this tool. If you’ve used it and have more to add, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.

      WordPress Blog

      WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging platforms. But a document collaboration tool? WordPress comes in two flavors, WordPress.org, the self-hosted version, like this blog, and WordPress.com which is hosted on their servers. Both are free to use, but you need to sign up with a web host for the self-hosted version. Although WordPress.org offers a wide array of useful themes and plugins to customize a site, for our purposes, WordPress.com will do.

      After you’ve quickly set up a WordPress account, create a new blog and adjust the settings to “private”. Next, add your colleagues, clients or team members. You’ll be asked for their name and email address and to assign a role of editor or author. Editors can add, edit or remove any content and Authors can only add, change or remove their own content. Now all team members can create and share text, images and videos.

      Did we miss your favorite tool? Please share in the comments below.

      (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/3632325213)

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