5 great cloud based tools to help keep your team organized

Here's five simple yet powerful cloud based tools to help you organise 5 critical area's of your business.

Basecamp: to organise your team

Basecamp was once a famously easy to use project management project management tool, but has now morphed into a team collaboration tool. It remains incredibly easy to use and effective with wonderfully simple pricing.

One of the coolest features that helps keep your team engaged is the Automatic Check-ins feature which encourages staff (remote and local) to answer simple questions on a regular basis, such as "What are you working on this week?" and "What did you work on today?" ,  It's a great way to surface ideas and insights that are usually locked away in people’s head or kick off discussions based on people’s answers.
 
 Basecamp is a great way to keep your whole team up to date and working together:  www.basecamp.com

Highrise: to organise your correspondence

Highrise is a simple easy to use tool to organise your contacts, correspondence and follow up tasks.

A great feature is that you can just forward any email you receive from a contact to your Highrise dropbox and it will automatically file it agains the contact in Highrise.

This is a huge productivity boost and you'll always be able to find correspondence with any contact.  You can also setup pre-defined email templates to save you time writing repetitive emails. Enabling you to also use Highrise as a support solution by centralising all your inbound and outbound support emails.

Highrise is great for anyone wanting an easy to use solution to better manage communications:  www.highrisehq.com

Brandkit: to organise your marketing content

Brandkit is a place where you can store and organise all your brand and marketing files, such as images, logos, brochures, videos, etc.

It's easy to upload and organise your files with tags. 

Then because everything is one secure place in the cloud, you can then find and share with others or download and use instantly. Everything is accessible via browser on your PC, smartphone or tablet any where anytime.

Brandkit is designed especially to handle your brand and marketing files. Benefits of Brandkit over something like Dropbox or say Google drive, is that you can allow self-service access to your files via a public portal and restrict what files each user has access to based on Asset Licences and User Roles.

In addition Brandkit automatically attaches Brand Guidelines to user downloads, tracks usage and can automatically notify users if you update a file.

Brandkit is a great option, if you are having trouble finding, using and sharing your marketing content: www.brandkit.io

Google Drive: to organise your documents

If you want to go paperless in your office or just make all your documents, bills and other paperwork searchable, Google Drive is hard to beat.

Google Drive offers an advantage over other cloud storage services in that  it indexes your files the same way Google does the Web, to make everything you save there searchable.

Trello: to organize your projects

Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into sections called boards.

In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process. It's easy to understand what's happening with tasks organised into visual boards and individual tasks.

As the project progress you can just drag a task from one board to the next, until complete. Very simple and effective.

You can also invite contractors and clients to collaborate of projects. A great way to give your clients insights about project progress.

Trello is a great tool for organising and managing projects and getting things done: www.trello.com

Remember there's no "i" in team. To make these tools effective, you need everyone on board and using them. Good luck and Happy Organising :)