The good thing about this app is there’s no obscure name: the title says exactly what it’s for. And that’s any project – whether planning a new business or working out the details of an ad campaign – that requires you to work with team members in far flung places, in other companies, out of hours or just in a smarter way.
The first step is to get a room, in a professional capacity of course. You name the room according to what you’re trying to achieve, then it becomes a repository for whatever you want to share. That might be files, photos, videos, web links, comments, ratings, tasks or chat. Next you ask others to join you in the room – they can be from your existing phone contacts or via email invite.
Available for iOS and Android and on web browser, the free version is good for small teams. It allows you to set up rooms for five users, share files of up to 10MB and get 500MB of storage.
There are a range of paid versions to get more users and share bigger files: for $13.99 a month you get 1GB of storage. For $124.99 a month you get rooms for 50 users, the ability to appoint admins and moderators for rooms, file sharing for 500MB files, 25GBs of storage and priority support. There are also annual subscription options.
The paid versions of Collaborate also integrate with cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, iCloud and Google Drive. And in the latest version you get an email with updates from your rooms.
Collaborate is a well designed app that doesn’t try to do too much, and it’s worth moving to the paid options for larger teams.
