6.2.2 Collaboration Software

6.2.2 Collaboration Software Collaboration just means to work together. Collaboration software is software that helps everyone work together effectively when it comes to technology. The goal is to make it easy for groups of people to focus on a common goal or task. This is especially important today, where it's more common that coworkers and classmates aren't in the same location together. Communication Apps There are many software tools available for improving teamwork, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and more. The essential features of these apps are the Instant Messaging and video conferencing, which make working remotely much easier.These apps are crucial for filling in that face-to-face communication gap. A Zoom call can take the place of a meeting in the conference room, and a team Slack channel can substitute for the water cooler talk that lets coworkers get to know each other. Remote work saves companies money by reducing the need for office space and personnel, so even though it's a little more complicated, it's in their interest to find ways to replace the interpersonal communication that used to happen at the office and keep everyone feeling involved."To Zoom" has become a verb in its own right meaning to have a video conference call. The biggest problem with a Zoom call is dealing with the different time zones of people working in different parts of the United States or the world. For example, if some people are on the East Coast and others are on the West Coast, there's a three-hour time difference between them. When the East Coasters are leaving for lunch, the West Coaster are just starting their day. It gets even harder when some people are in North America and others are in Europe, Asia, or Africa. Think of the 12-14 hour time difference between the United States and China. It could be noon in one place and midnight in the other. But then again, you can work in your pajamas no matter what time of day it is! File Sharing An early part of working together online was file sharing. You could upload a file to a cloud storage service and then email a link to someone so they could access it. Services like Dropbox, OneDrive (which used to be called SkyDrive), and iCloud have been offering this for over a decade. They let you store a limited amount of files for free, but if you need more space, you can pay a small monthly fee.The benefit to this is that it's so easy to share large files this way. Email services usually limit attachments to about 25 MB. Also, sharing files in the cloud is better than emailing them back and forth. You can work on a file while automatically saving it to the cloud. And the person you shared it with can make changes without waiting for you to send it back. This way, you know that you're always working on the most up-to-date version, which isn't always the case with email.Cloud service providers also keep older versions of files in storage, so you can go back to an earlier version if you need. Let's say you mess something up enough that it's better to just start over from an earlier point. Since there are backups, you don't have to worry about losing something forever. There's probably going to be some version of a file that you can retrieve if something happens to your local computer, like an accidental deletion, ransomware, or a system crash.