Collaborative Working

Many businesses spend their working day communicating with customers, suppliers and colleagues. Each business losses an estimate £10k per year sitting in traffic en route to meetings. This doesn't take into account the time and cost of communicating across their companies or distributed workforces. In other words the things businesses are doing to ensure they run smoothly are actually costing them money.

Collaboration tools can replace face-to-face meetings, allowing you to work with a team in another office, another company, or even another time zone. But they are just as useful to help you stay on top of projects that involve people in the same office, because they bring together the information and resources you need to run your business on a daily basis.

The range of available tools and technologies is vast, including Instant messaging and discussion forums, audio and video conferencing, group diaries and address books, hosted virtual offices, and collaborative whiteboard and presentation systems.

It's easy to become overwhelmed by the many options, to choose what is right for your business you need to understand what is on offer from the different types of tools and what you can actually achieve when you use them.