IT - PRODUCTIVITY - 22.06.2020

How to optimise employee collaboration

With homeworking becoming the “new norm” for many businesses, having the ability to collaborate with others on projects has become a key requirement. Is Samepage a solution worth considering in your business?

Compose teams

As soon as you have signed up with Samepage ( http://www.samepage.io ), you will have access to your personal dashboard, where you can create groups (via the Teams menu on the left) and invite people by e-mail, both colleagues and external workers. They should then sign up to Samepage themselves in order to gain access to the team(s) they belong to.

Tip. You can create an unlimited number of groups, e.g. for individual customers or projects. In addition, you have the possibility to set the privacy level: this can be “open” , “protected” (visible to everyone but editable only by team members) or “private” (only visible to and editable by members).

Note. Consider this privacy setting carefully, because it can be changed only if you are using the paid-for Pro version. Fortunately, an open “Everyone” team is also offered by default.

Pages

Create pages. Within each team, you can create various “pages” covering e.g. a specific part of a project, an event, etc. You can start from a blank page, but there are also handy templates, for instance for project planning, the minutes of a meeting, task lists with multiple priorities, or brainstorming.

Add content. All team members can now add information to the pages by uploading various types of file (optionally directly from Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive) or adding content in standardised formats. Examples are: tasks you assign to others, tables, diagrams, surveys, events, Google Maps and HTML codes - the latter is useful for users who collaborate with others on a website.

Communication. Within each team page, there is a separate chat option that allows you to communicate with the other members, while you can also upload illustrations and other files if you wish.

Tip 1. In such chat sessions, you can easily refer to a specific page by typing “@”. There is also a possibility to chat privately with others, and there’s a search function to find information quickly. This can come in handy, since all the chat conversations and their history are saved.

Tip 2. Audio and video conversations are possible too.

Overview. The menu bar on the left gives you a good overview of all your teams, tasks, events, etc.

Useful?

More detailed reviews of Samepage can be found at Capterra ( https://www.capterra.co.uk/software/147578/samepage ). A positive element is that it’s completely free for an unlimited number of users, teams, team members and guests. The chats and search function have no restrictions. In short, if you do not use an online collaboration tool yet, Samepage is definitely worth a try.

On the downside, there is somewhat limited maximum storage space of 2GB in the free version. If you want to lift this restriction and require more administrator and team options, you could consider the Pro version ( https://www.samepage.io/pricing ) - it costs $9 or about £7 per month per user (or $8 or £6.20 with annual billing).

Give Samepage a try if you’re looking for a user-friendly tool for monitoring your projects. This is done by means of “pages” on which a wide variety of content can be collected. The free version will suffice for most purposes, though storage space is limited to 2GB. The paid-for version costs from £7 per month, per user.

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