This is a guest post from David Lazar, a tech blogger writing on behalf of http://www.convertpdftopowerpoint.com/.
These days more and more offices are turning into virtual offices. Having employees that are on another continent no longer poses a problem thanks to the great advances in communication technology made in recent history. In order for a virtual office to function properly, finding a way to constantly communicate and collaborate is essential. While there are some great screencasting tools that you can use to send your employees a visualization of your ideas or perhaps a recorded tutorial, there are many such things that should be done live and as personally as possible.
Thankfully, there are some great tools available that you can use in order to hold real-time and live collaborative conferences, tutorials or brainstorming sessions no matter what parts of the world your employees are working from. Here are five not only excellent, but completely free tools that will allow you to hold professional, productive and effective online presentations, demonstrations and conferences live and in real time.
TeamViewer
If you are looking for a screen sharing application for holding tutorials or showing your co-workers something you are working on, TeamViewer is one of the best free tools available. It allows you to connect over 20 team members and allows all of them to share their screens with one another. The collaborative features also allow team members to work on a file at the same time and transfer files between each other easily and effectively.
Join.me
Join.me is great because it was made to work for both Windows-based computers and Macs. It also has a feature that makes sure that you are only sharing your screen with people you want to see it, by giving them a code that they need to use in order to gain access to your screen view. Join.me is one of the better tools for tutorials are project walk-throughs and presentations.
Google Hangouts
This tool allows you to hold a video conference with your team and share your screen with them, though only one person can share a screen at a time. The biggest advantage of Google Hangouts is that you can combine and merge it with Google Docs, allowing you to collaborate on various files with your team simultaneously.
Vyew
Vyew has just about every collaborative feature you can imagine. You can share your screen with your co-workers, you can chat via text, audio or video, upload files and work on them simultaneously, and even take notes on a virtual whiteboard that is set up for you and your colleagues to use. The best thing about Vyew is that it does not require any software to be downloaded or installed – it is completely online-based.
Scribblar
Scribblar is a bit simpler, but it is still a great free tool for live collaboration online. Basically, you and your co-workers are given a whiteboard where you can share ideas. While you write on the board and flesh out ideas on it, you can use the chat box on the side to talk between one another, or you can initiate a voice chat as well.
Big Marker
We are probably saving the best for last with Big Marker – it certainly has a huge amount of features for a free online tool. Big Marker gives you an online meeting room of your own that you can either make private or public. If you make the room public, anyone using the service can come in, but if you make it a private room, then only people you give the password to can enter. Once inside, you can do a variety of things – chat via text or audio, share screens, upload files, write on a whiteboard, or turn on your webcam to discuss something with your team. You are in control of what is being seen and heard as the conference room creator, which is also good for keeping these presentations focused and productive.
These six tools allow you to collaborate and hold demonstrations with your team even when you do not share the same office and thanks to tools like these, more and more offices are going virtual every day.
