Collaboration Tools: The Hunt

I have been on the look out for great collaboration tools and software. 


It is completely unrealistic and inconvenient to not have some means of sharing ideas and documents in a centralized, accessible place.


Emailing attachments, downloading them, making changes, then emailing the attachments back is time consuming and completely archaic.


So I began the search for the best, greatest, most innovative (and free?) collaboration tools that I could find. Searching for "free collaboration tools" seemed like a simple enough search, but I was incorrect. Millions of hits on Google was just too many.


I realized that if I was going to narrow my search at all, I'd have to figure out what I valued in collaboration tools. What were the deal breakers?


Some were obvious:

• it had to offer file sharing.
• it had to be FREE. (I discovered that "free" is not always "free".)
• it had to be simple to use.

Once I got past those parameters, I had to figure out what criteria really mattered. I chose:

• Hardware/Software Requirements & OS/Browser compatibility
• Number of users per "project"
• Storage space
• Synchronization & Email availability
• Security

Once under the microscope, I was able to get a better idea of each collaboration tool's strengths and weaknesses (for my purposes).

In each subsequent post, I will review the tools and assign them a grade based on the criteria listed above.