Until quantum physicists finally achieve teleportation, more and more companies are embracing telecommuting as a great option for breaking the archaic office walls.Whether you're making a case on why you should be able to work remotely, or if you're simply looking for tools to better collaborate, look no further.Read: How Successful Tech Teams Work Remotely We spoke with Brian Manning, cofounder of Centric Digital, named one of Inc 500's Fastest Growing Companies about managing teams spread across the globe. We also spoke with Court Demone, design and marketing lead at both SearchTempest.com and AutoTempest.com as well as Preet Anand, CEO of tech company Blue Light about their favorite apps for working from home.Here are the top tools they simply can't live without, in no particular order:
- Google Hangouts
- All of the companies we spoke with use Google Hangouts regularly to have virtual face-to-face meetings.
- Pivotal Tracker
- This is an Agile development task manager, where Demone’s team stores all of the things they’re going to be doing, whether it’s code based or marketing based.
- Bit Bucket
- Demone uses this as their Git depositary. All of their code and server information is stored here. It also offers wikis that are incredibly useful as well.
- Google Docs
- Great for marketing and advertising efforts.
- Box
- Document management.
- Google Voice
- Great for international calls.
- Join.me
- Some prefer this screen-sharing application.
- Harvest
- Tracking time and expenses.
- Smartsheet
- Project planning tool.
- Bamboo HR
- Centric Digital's whole human resource info system is managed using this.
- GitHub
- For coding versioning
- Slack
- Anand's team prefers this for team chatting. He says it's awesome.
- Skype
- Team meetings, of course. An alternative to Hangouts.
- Asana
- Task management app preferred by Anand's team at BlueLight.
- JIRA
- Bug tracking, Agile project planning used by Centric Digital.