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:
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Google Hangouts
All of the companies we spoke with use Google Hangouts regularly to have virtual face-to-face meetings.
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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.
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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.
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Google Docs
Great for marketing and advertising efforts.
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Box
Document management.
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Google Voice
Great for international calls.
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Join.me
Some prefer this screen-sharing application.
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Harvest
Tracking time and expenses.
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Smartsheet
Project planning tool.
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Bamboo HR
Centric Digital’s whole human resource info system is managed using this.
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GitHub
For coding versioning
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Slack
Anand’s team prefers this for team chatting. He says it’s awesome.
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Skype
Team meetings, of course. An alternative to Hangouts.
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Asana
Task management app preferred by Anand’s team at BlueLight.
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JIRA
Bug tracking, Agile project planning used by Centric Digital.