As business has become more globalized, collaboration has become an important part of a successful workplace. A 2013 survey found that collaboration has increased greatly in just the last three years with over 50% of workers saying that they routinely work with people in different geographic locations and over 60% saying they often work with at least 10 people a day in order complete their job.  So, I thought I’d take a look at some tools that can help collaborative efforts be more efficient and successful. The first is Google Drive.

Google Drive is a free tool that gives you access to a suite of web-based programs.  The programs are very similar to Windows Office and allow you to create word processing documents as well as spreadsheets and presentations.  The great thing about Google Drive is that you can save your documents to the cloud and then share them with anyone on your team.  They can then edit the documents, make comments or just view them depending on your preferences.  It can all be done in real time while you continue to edit the document yourself. The free Google Drive account also includes 5GB of file storage.