There are lots of inexpensive tools on the Interwebs that are really useful. I like finding them.

In school this year I’ve been assigned a very large group research project with four other students.  Traditionally, these kinds of projects start off pretty straightforward, with each person working individually to find data to solve a business problem.  But as the team gathers its research, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort though, organize, and actually use the myriad of stuff found by everyone.  This presents a significant problem when the project begins to take shape and the research everyone has collected needs to be applied to solutions dreamed up by the team after a lot of research has been done.

Luckily there are an increasing number of online collaborative tools that can be utilized to make collecting, finding, sorting, and editing online data found by a group of people easier.  My team has found Evernote and Dropbox to be extremely useful in helping us get through this process more efficiently.

I set up a new Evernote account and gave my team the username and password so that the five of us can use this one account.  Now we can clip data from web pages, tag these data with the subject matter and the name of the person tagging, and deposit it all into this one account.  It takes about 10 seconds to select specific text from a web page or the entire page and save it in Evernote’s servers (using the Evernote web clipper).  The result is a huge repository of research that can be searched and referenced extremely quickly by everyone, anytime.  Additionally, you can make blank notes to allow team members to share random ideas with each other.  For example, we have a note called “solution ideas” where all group members can quickly add and edit a running list of ideas within this note for solving our business problem.  This note is then used to provoke discussion when we have meetings.

While Evernote is great for storing text from websites and personal notes, it isn’t all that great for storing group documents or other files.  Now, it does have the ability to add any file to a note if you have a premium account (at $5 per month), but I don’t love this functionality.  (I discussed this in a previous post, here.  See the “file by file online backups” section.)  Dropbox is the solution my team is using for storing research found in pdf form or original documents that we create for our project.  Using my own Dropbox account, I created a folder called “research” and shared folder this with my teammates.  With everyone using the Dropbox desktop software, the folder and a copy of its contents is placed on all of our computers.  All teammates now have the ability to search for, add, and edit anything in this folder.  And while the folder to find these group docs is stored on our of computers locally, any changes made in the documents within these specific folders are synced with copies of these files stored on Dropbox’s servers, and in turn synced on all of the other teammate’s local folders.  (For more info about Dropbox, I have previously written about it here – again in the “file by file online backups” section.)

I am extremely impressed with these two products, and they have made this massive group project a heck of a lot easier for basically free.  Group collaboration is always tough, but these days I’m glad the Internet has tools like these to vastly improves this process.

Stay tuned for an inevitable future update after I FINALLY get my Google Wave invite – that thing’s all about making online group collaboration easier.

Related posts:

Evernote Rocks.