Collaborate for nothing, if you’re really small

Collaboration tools are getting to be a vital part of the everyday equipment for any business. Having staff able to work together on anything from a single document to a major project, regardless of where they are at the time, can be the difference between winning and losing business.

But collaboration tools can be expensive,  and often well beyond the reach of the small business community. But `free’ can become an interesting word in such circumstances. And a free, cloud or on-premise based social networking and collaboration tool is what US-based Bitrix is offering with the latest release of Bitrix24.

Not surprisingly, there are a couple of caveats. One is that it is only free for businesses requiring fewer than 12 collaborators. The other is that the storage allowance, 5Gbytes, is probably soon going to get eaten up. But that said, the paid for service plans are either $99 a month for 50Gbytes or $199 a month for 100 Gbytes, both with unlimited user numbers.  

The new version brings along several new capabilities to help users create, edit and collaborate on documents online. Most important of all, this is directly targeted at the growing army of smartphone and tablet users looking to collaborate through cloud services.

In addition to using Bitrix24 instant messenger for video and group chats, users now use video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. There are also email connectors to MS Exchange, Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, iCloud and other popular e-mail services.

A core part of the suite is Activity Stream, which has been enhanced with real time updates, smart forwarding, notification options and company-wide announcements, while engagement analytics module called Company Pulse has been added to provide real time indicators for enterprise social network adoption, identify roadblocks and slow adopters, and show which intranet tools are currently being (under)used by employees.

Bitrix24 has also released a fully functional mobile CRM, which allows creation or editing of CRM entries and invoices directly from the mobile device. The new mobile app also allows using multiple Bitrix24 accounts from a single smartphone or tablet.

“2013 has been a year of significant growth for us,” said Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov. “we’ve signed up 90,000 companies, which is well over 500,000 users for the cloud and onsite versions of Bitrix24 intranet. Our workforce grew by 40 percent to over 130 employees and we opened three new sales and support offices. GooglePlay now lists Bitrix24 among the top 5 mobile intranet apps, along with or surpassing such established enterprise social brands as Jive Software, IBM Connection, VMWare SocialCast and TIBCO Tibbr. We hope to have a million users by the end of the year.”