a nursing informatics toolbox

5 Popular Collaboration Applications that you might not heard of

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Rolando Cabral • 34 Comments


A day in the life of a Nurse Informaticist is always spent with collaboration and communication activities. Every day we are expected to work with our project teams to ensure that our efforts are in synch with each other. However, some of us are stuck with an unattractive and poorly designed company portal that lacks the features that we actually need. The result is diminished productivity and wasted resources.

In my experience, most companies deploy SharePoint application but fail to use its fullest capability to serve its users. They do not even ask us about the specific requirements of our team. SharePoint is a very powerful application that can be customized according to the needs of the group. It even has a social networking capability similar to some popular “social” sites. The sad part is that nobody even bothers to use it. Work should be fun and work should be social, right!
OK! Here are some of the free alternatives that you might find useful and fun.

1. ProjectPier– is an open source application which allows the team to create projects, timelines, task list, documents/file repository and messaging function. It can be installed in your server and with a little customization; it can be an indispensable tool which can increase your team productivity. Even better, it’s free.

2. Liferay-is an enterprise collaboration application solution. It aims to streamline communication and productivity by adding a “social touch” to the boring enterprise collaboration environment. It’s like Linkedin meets SharePoint kind of deal. This is a beautiful application.

3. Clocking It– if you need a project management application with task filters, timelines, milestones, calendar, graphs, messaging, and time tracking, this is the one you need. It’s strongest suit is its ability to monitor and log the time you spent on a particular task.

4. Basecamp-is the most popular web based project-management tool. It was developed by 37signals in 2004 to provide a better and user friendlier alternatives to MS Project and other similar applications. It is now being used by a large number of businesses from freelancers to Fortune 500 companies. It’s free with limited functionality. I am currently using it for my software development team. I love it!

 

5. LessTimeSpent– as the name implies, its strongest suit is time tracking. This application will enable a freelancer or a project team to bill their customers seamlessly and accurately.

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