🚀 Using [free] Online Tools to Improve Team Collaboration

[cjdenio]

Howdy, nice to meet you!

I’m Caleb, a software developer from the far realm of New Hampshire, and I’d like to share my experiences with various helpful (and not-so-helpful) online tools for team collaboration. These are all tools that my team is currently using, or that I’m currently using for personal/professional things. Who knows, maybe the words down there will even help you a bit

Running a team isn’t easy, but I hope you leave this post with a greater knowledge of the awesomeness of team organization.

Without further ado, let’s get started! Here are my 4 favorite team collaboration tools:

Slack

Communication

Still using email and/or group texts to get the word across? Enter Slack, a professional communication tool with a generous free plan. Conversation in Slack is separated into channels, spaces where different parts of your team can communicate with ease. Nobody needs to be in every single channel, so hardware members don’t need to see software discussion

I’ve been using Slack for some time now, and I can attest to its simplicity and power, evident even in its free plan. Some of my favorite features:

• Integrations and bots let you work more productively by integrating the tools you already use into Slack.
• Threads: To avoid filling up a channel, you can reply to a specific message. Only the original poster (and other thread participants) are notified of your reply.
• Direct Messages let you send a message to a single person (or a group of up to ten people).
• File Sharing: You can share files
• Slack is really, truly realtime. Email isn’t. Sorry!

My favorite integrations:

• FRCBot is an awesome integration that lets you subscribe to an FRC event in any Slack channel.
• Simple Poll gives you native polls in Slack to help your team make crucial decisions.
• Chessbot makes it possible to play Chess in Slack

Find more on the Slack App Directory.

Trello

Project Management

Trello keeps everyone on the same page. It’s a project management tool (with a free plan, of course ) that separates tasks into lists, like To Do, Doing, and Done. Tasks, or “Cards” can also be commented on, assigned to users, and more. You can even attach due dates, checklists, and tags. Trello’s Power-Up integration system lets you add even more features to this already-powerful platform .

My team recently came back to Trello after a few years of drifting. It gives our members a clear view of what’s being done, who’s doing what, and what needs to be done.

You can sign up for a free team account to group your team’s to-do lists, or “Boards” together, or you can get a personal account to use it for personal things.

If you have a TV in your work space, try using Trello Display to run a live-updating board off of a laptop. It’s open source!

GitHub

Code hosting/collaboration

Software members: this is for you.
GitHub is a platform for teams and individuals to host, collaborate on, and share code. No more flash drives! By signing up for an organization account, everyone on your team can access and modify the code. Visual Studio Code, the official code editor for FIRST teams, integrates with GitHub (or more specifically, Git) right out of the box.
GitHub also maintains version control, meaning that every change you push is logged, and you can go back to a previous version if you want

I’m a devoted GitHub user, both as an individual and with organizations. As an individual, GitHub lets you grow your portfolio. (here’s mine) As a team, it gives you collaboration, project management, and issue tracking abilities. It boasts a user-friendly interface, and power integration with other services. If you’re not using GitHub (or another cloud version control system), I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Mailchimp

Email marketing platform

Create and send beautifully designed newsletter emails to people not in Slack, like sponsors, parents, and anyone else who wants to hear!

Mailchimp is a must-use platform for teams looking to send out newsletters to non-team members.

What’s your favorite team collaboration tool?

Let me know by leaving a reply! I’d love to chat about what your team is using, has used, and wants to use.

Runners-up:

Onshape

Build, share, and store CAD models in the cloud

Zoho Mail

Get professional [email protected] -like email addresses with up to five free accounts

Mattermost

Self-hosted, open-source alternative to Slack

[asid61]

Slack’s 10k message limit is a bit annoying for busy teams. Have you had an issue with this in the past?

Great list, I’ll refer this to people setting up teams.

[Mink]

Zoho Mail is what we use for communication with the team, parents and mentors. I’d recommend it to basically anyone, it’s really useful.

[cjdenio]

Slack’s message/file limit can be annoying at times, but I’ve never had an important message deleted due to old age. The problem lies with files: It’s super important to back up files to an external service like Google Drive (especially photos, they’re important)

You can always purchase a paid plan, but Slack remains the best free communication tool I’ve seen.
I’m adding Mattermost to the runners-up list, it’s an awesome self-hosted alternative to Slack (that doesn’t have any limits)

[BryceHanson]

I’d like to put MailChimp in there for messaging sponsors, parents, and community partners. Easy to make stylish, on brand emails for the people who aren’t on Slack.

[cjdenio]

Of course! I knew I was forgetting something!
We use Mailchimp pretty extensively for communication with parents.
Thanks for the contribution!

[Jon_Stratis]

G-Suite. Couldn’t live without it.

[cjdenio]

I’m curious, did you guys qualify for Google for Nonprofits? I’ve heard that FIRST teams can have some trouble getting 501(c )(3) status, due to being part of a school.
G Suite is an awesome tool, but it can get a bit pricey at $6/person/month

[Karaoke]

I, personally, am quite the fan of Onshape. As far as I know, this is my team’s first year using it, and collaboration is super easy.
For a lot of our stuff, we have a shared Google Drive folder.

I think I’ve heard of Trello before. I feel like it could benefit my team, so I’ll ask if we can look into that. Thank you for sharing these!

[Nick.kremer]

@asid61

Slack’s 10k message limit is a bit annoying for busy teams

You can get the standard tier of Slack for free if you have a non profit. My team pulled the trigger on this for the 2020 and it’s been a huge success for team communication, particularly now with in person meetings cancelled.

I’d also like to recommend GrabCAD. It’s a a cloud-based file management system. It’s designed for CAD files in mind, but you can just as easily share other types as files as well. It’s free, and software agnostic. Additionally I don’t believe there’s a storage limit.

[ahartnet]

I had an issue with mail chimp messages being auto sorted into spam by Gmail filters. Is this an issue others have had?

[a_cool_username]

Obligatory Discord drop. Similar to Slack, but marketed towards gamers instead of professionals. It lacks some of the features of Slack (no threads is main thing imo). I’ve used both (both for a team and personally) and I don’t have much of a preference either way.

+1 for GrabCad, it’s very useful

[arduinokid55]

Not Mr. Stratis, but we got it through our parent booster club which is a registered 501c3 Nonprofit. Works great for emails, and file storage.

[Mondkurry]

+1 on the Discord. We have been using Discord for the past year and it has been way better than Slack was for us in terms of how much traffic we actually got on the server. We found that since most students already have a discord that they check, they would actually see messages and reply very quickly on discord. It isn’t marketed for professionals but at the end of the day the point of the tool (for us at least) was to increase communication, not to increase the professional appearance of our team.

[bobbysq]

@a_cool_username

lacks some of the features of Slack (no threads is main thing imo)

Role management, voice channels, and group pings make up for this entirely in my opinion. If Slack had all of those available in the free plan, I would see no reason not to use it over Discord. Until then, I can’t recommend Slack at all unless you’re forced to use it.

[Dylan116]

Also Discord doesn’t have the 10k limit on the free plan which is also pretty important imo. We could easily run through those that limit during build season and I’d like to refer to messages from before build season.

[Karaoke]

Oh, I almost forgot to mention GroupMe! Our student leadership uses it to communicate quickly, and I think the mentors have their own chat as well.

[Jon_Stratis]

The school has a G-Suite domain (private school, they have their own non-profit status, which might make things different from public schools). Everyone (teachers, administrators, students, and even mentors) has an account, so for us it was just a question of working with the IT admin at the get us set up. Really the only semi-complicated part was email - the team has our own web domain for our website, and there was some configuration to do on both ends to get @therobettes.com emails to funnel through properly. But it lets us utilize Google Groups for most of those, which is nicer than the mail service our provider had.

[cjdenio]

Discord certainly has features worth using, though I do have a couple key differences I’d like to put here:

• Slack’s API is much more powerful. Discord doesn’t even support custom slash commands, not to mention dialog boxes and interactive messages!
• Slack can separate messages into threads, thus cleaning up some of the channels.
• Slack has an official app/bot directory, while Discord doesn’t.
• On paid plans, Slack lets you create shared channels, bringing multiple workspaces into a single channel.
• Slack’s apps and bots are tailored towards teams, while Discord focuses on games and chatbots. Also, Slack makes it easy to tell which integrations are official.

Discord is pretty cool though.

[cjdenio]

@ahartnet

I had an issue with mail chimp messages being auto sorted into spam by Gmail filters

You’ll need to do some configuration to get that to work. By default, Mailchimp only “impersonates” the From address, so Gmail may stick newsletters into spam Depending on your email provider, you’ll have to do some Googling to learn how to setup Mailchimp’s email delivery.