Boosting collaboration is a central theme to many companies' operational strategies. The more that people can do as a team, the less costly operations have to be. That is a sound business strategy. Today, many businesses are looking to software to build a successful collaborative situation. Let’s take a look at three such apps that, if used properly, will help any business boost their team’s ability to work together. 

Discord

Discord was developed as a video conferencing solution for gamers, and operated in that fashion for a number of years, but over time it gained popularity because of the number of communication options that the software presents. Some organizations have gone so far as moving from more traditional collaboration apps to Discord because it is effective. 

At its base, Discord is basically a conferencing application that is free to use. Users can create their own servers and use them to host several types of communication such as video chat, audio chat, and text messages. You can easily share screens and do it all in real-time. This is the part about Discord that gives it its benefits. Discord offers bots that help keep users focused on a task and offers organizations a great option as a team-building app.

Without the massive list of useful integrations found with titles like Microsoft Teams and Slack, Discord doesn’t provide a lot of the tools built in to those other platforms, but is an extremely useful tool for collaboration nonetheless.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams’ biggest benefit is a direct integration with Office 365. In a single window, users can view their Outlook-based communications and calendars, as well as create, share, and edit work found on the Microsoft Office platform. Shared workspaces are abound in Office 365 from apps such as OneDrive, OneNote and SharePoint. It provides a centralized platform in which to communicate, manage, and delegate work. 

Microsoft Teams also offers a bunch of active integrations that provide third-party applications access, building on this cache of apps regularly. This provides teams with tools that aren’t native to Office 365. More than that, a direct integration with Skype provides meeting capabilities that fuel collaborative endeavors and push initiatives along faster. 

Slack

Slack, much like Microsoft Teams, is an extraordinarily useful tool for teams looking to collaborate. is a collaboration software designed to make project-based management easier. It is set up as a chat program with forum-like resources and a massive amount of integrations available to teams of people. Therefore, users can customize their Slack experience to meet their needs. The platform is used by millions of companies so the application integrations are current and updated with new features regularly. 

In utilizing Slack, companies can work to replace a lot of the other traditional business communications such as email and text messaging and are available on desktop platforms and mobile platforms for continuous communication. 

Is your business looking to add to its collaborative toolbox? Would any of these three work for your needs? Does your organization utilize any of these? If so, leave your experiences in the comments section below and return to our blog regularly for more great IT content.