“GTD Online” Special: My favourite cloud computing, online collaboration and productivity tools

Call it a symptom of my having to work in a highly restrictive IT environment (I concur with this post btw.), but I feel myself drawn to the wide open spaces of working on cool things with smart people using wicked tools, preferably online. I did some research on the latter part and wanted to share it with you. Here is the “Getting Things Done Online” Special.

Hit the Read more link for a list and brief comparison of truly wicked online tools that can work as your catalyst for bringing cool things to life with smart people.

Standard documents
Like docs/spreadsheets/slides, then you’ll love the well known: http://docs.google.com/
Google Docs is free to use, offers online collaboration without restrictions.

If you’d like some choice you can go for one of the fragmented/decentralised solutions:
Word editing: scribd
Presentations: SlideShare

If you prefer to stay local when creating and editing but want to share a document with the world you can turn to docstoc.

And now on to your more special types of document, the ones that are more interesting than the normal spreadsheets and so on …

Mind Maps
Like mindmaps, then you’ll love: http://mindmeister.com/ which offers a full midmapping tool with online collaboration. They also offer an iPhone app, which unfortunately costs extra.
Plans:

• Personal basic account is free of charge but restricts one to 3 mindmaps with unlimited collaboration, premium account costs $4/month with unlimited mindmaps.
• Business access comes in various forms starting at $6/month for 1 users, $29/month for 5 users, $59/month for 10 users, $149/month for 25 users, and so on, with payment due annually.
• Academic options give 90% discounts: Per User $15/year, Per Campus for Primary School $500/year, Secondary School $900/year, University (Band A) $1,800/year, University (Band B) $3,600/year.

A fully free alternative can be found at http://bubble.us/ but while that is free it is not as nifty, quick and impressive.

Flow Charts
Like flow-charts? Then you’ll love: http://creately.com/
Their public plan is free to use and allows sharing with 5 people. They currently work on a “Plus” plan with unlimited collaboration but I think in most scenarios You+5 works just fine.

Mock Ups
Now with mock ups it is critical to be able to put things down from mind to “paper” as quickly as possible so the tool must be really user friendly. One tool that can do this easily for you is Balsamiq’s Mock Ups. Now this little gem will set you back $79.00 but when it comes to mock-ups I struggled to find anything that works as well as this one.

Project, task & team management
Now this is the most challenging of all online collaboration categories in my humble opinion. I kept scanning the vast spheres of the online and I’m gonna mention my favorite first: http://producteev.com/
This solution truly integrates with everything that connects people out there, such as Twitter, facebook, IM networks and even the good old trusted eMail. Producteev is a really cool way of managing tasks, projects and even people.

Plans:

• The plans start with a free personal membership which you can upgrade to the Premium one that sets you back just $5 per month. The small difference between free/basic and Premium is reporting. Now this may seem like a negligible difference but having tested this service I wish I had full reporting. This would help me to share the status of everything that I am tracking with people, so I’m considering switching to that plan.
• They also offer business plans starting at $19/month for 10 users, $44/month for 30 users and $99 for 100 users, more upon request.

Certainly there or other offers but I’ve not been anywhere nearly as impressed as with Producteev. One I’d like to mention that seems really professional is PBWorks who offer several editions, each optimized for a specific line of work. The only thing that I didn’t enjoy too much is not seeing a price tag. Services that tell me to “contact the sales team for a quote” always make me look somewhere else.

For developers
Besides Google’s code.google.com there are a few other options, especially if you’d like to work on code in collaboration with others. A prime example for this it github.

Have you had any experience with these or other tools? Share your views in the comment please.