Truth be told, “best” depends on your needs. But, we’ve asked some smart, efficient people their favourite apps for working with groups. We’ve added our own research to discover the better “herding cats” tools.

Let us know what you think!

Meeting Schedulers

Recommended: Doodle – the easiest. Within 1 minute you can prepare a meeting description and enter choices to select for all users invited to your meeting. They click their available times and a winner is found.

Also check out: Calendly: Ideal if you organise lots of meetings and want other people to choose from your available times. Share your personal Calendly links. They pick an available time and the event is added to your calendar. (note: doesn’t integrate with Mac ical). ScheduleOnce is more an enterprise product. x.ai – Copy Amy, your virtual assistant on your email and she corresponds with the group to find a common meeting time and diarise it.

Doodle.com

Note: Room booking – Robinpowered to take the headache out of managing who’s booked where when.

Presentations

Recommended: Prezi. The templates are more contemporary and varied than Powerpoint or Keynote. Plus it’s collaborative in real time. Done!

Project management 

Rather than try to keep track of emails by thread, group messaging tools let the team talk by topic. It’s basically Whattsapp on steroids. Slack is first choice for its ease of use and ability to integrate with other services such as Skype. You’re able to upload and share files with them too. Also check out: Hipchat (by Australian company Atlassian) still has a substantial following. And you can’t count out Microsoft’s Yammer, which has deep ties into Office 365.

Slack.com

Also recommended – Basecamp is an online project-management platform that lets a number of people collaborate on a project.You can track projects and tasks via to-do lists, host written discussions, embed media files (images, videos). It’s simple and you can send email notifications to your inbox when a task or discussion is relevant to you. Also check out: Asana to keep critical info in one place like a bank.

Collaborative To Do lists

Recommended – Wunderlist

It’s easy and collaborative. Also check out: Any.do. It’s key differentiator is “the moment”: a push notification you get each morning telling you to plan your day. There are also a few other cool things like voice entry and the ability to shake your device to clear finished tasks.

Other cool stuff

Collect for office group gifts online – no more hassling for money.

GroupTogether.com is an Australian website that makes it easy to collect for office farewells, get wells, baby gifts etc. They don’t sell gifts. They collect the money, handle reminders and card. It’s easy and free to set up quicker than you can walk round with a big card. Share a link or add emails. Anyone who chips in online can add a message and pic to the card. They transfer the money to you in one go so you can buy whatever you like. People who use it say that they collect 5 times the amount and with less hassle.

Instant group polling in real time for presentations + quizzes

Polleverywhere helped create the field of vote-by-texting. Their systems can handle huge audiences and display immediate results. Also check out – Zeetings and Getahoot is the simplest (designed for kids).

Group brainstorming that’s visual and online

Mural.ly Let’s you use virtual sticky notes to contribute ideas and then sort them spacially to organize them

Mural.ly

Screen Sharing – let’s everyone see your screen live on their screen.

JoinMe

“Because it’s so fast to set up a meeting and share a link, it works even if I’m already mid-call when I realize I need to share my screen.” – Harvard Business Review Online

Watch this space!

Already 8000 people have signed up for the pre-launch of ScribblePost, a to-do app that’s described as the world’s first productivity network. Capture meeting notes in ScribblePost, tag (#) important actions and ‘@ mention’ people while you’re typing. Then simply share the note with meeting participants to distribute follow-up actions. It’s easy to sort by person or topic and it integrates with your email account. Great for minute taking, sharing and searchable, sortable to-do lists.

Special thanks for your expertise to:

Andrew Pritchett

James Dellow

Daniel Ciampi

Katrina Brangwin