Top 10 Intercompany Online Collaboration Tools in 2021
Tags: Innovation, Microsoft Teams, Collaboration Tools, Slack, Business Communication

Working together has never meant just working with your colleagues. “Work” has almost always been an activity conducted between businesses. That’s why the rise of intercompany online collaboration tools is an exponential one.

Workplaces are changing. They are embracing more contractors, freelancers, and temporary employees. So, your business needs tools that enable you to collaborate as well externally as you do internally.

We’ve put together our top 10 tools to improve your intercompany collaboration efforts — and we’re even working on one ourselves.

1 — Mio Universal Channels

Let’s address the challenge of keeping people connected when they prefer to work on different apps and platforms.

Even if you have a bunch of Slack add-ons to make life easier for your external workers and collaborators, they’re not going to help if those people prefer to use Microsoft Teams.

It is unproductive moving out of your preferred app and starting the conversation again.

That’s why Mio has created universal channels for your combination of Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Webex Teams.

You can stay in Slack (if that’s the platform you use) and send messages to your contractors, suppliers, or clients that use Microsoft Teams or Webex.

They stay in their platform too and Mio translates the messages across platform.

And it’s not just messages that are supported! GIFs, emojis, channels, and message edits/deletes are all supported.

If this sounds like something you need, try Mio free on your preferred platform.

2 — Clockwise

Clockwise is a clever calendar assistant designed to improve your schedule management.

Interacting with a dispersed and global community of team members, suppliers, and shareholders often means balancing the perfect schedule.

You need your team to know when you’re going to be free to answer their questions and when you’re not available.

Clockwise integrates with tools like Slack to instantly let your team know when you’re available and what times you can make a meeting.

You also get a daily forecast delivered to you first thing each morning.

3 — SlashGator

Need to bypass the challenges of working in different time zones?

Using freelancers often means outsourcing to different regions to the one you operate in.

When contractors can work with you via the cloud and upload as they wish, your schedule gets pretty confusing. You might accidentally send messages when your colleagues are asleep.

Nobody wants a Slack notification during the middle of the night.

SlashGator helps business leaders respect work/life balance.

All you need to do is send a message on Slack to a coworker using /gator.

The app will automatically hold onto your content until 9 am in the other person’s local time zone.

Your message will appear in the same way as it always does, with the same emojis, links, and @mentions you would expect from a typical message.

4 — Guru

Another challenge people tell me about when dealing with external teams is making sure knowledge flows freely through the workforce.

Guru integrates with Slack to make sure your team — and anyone else you interact with — can capture crucial information in seconds.

You can pull information through Guru from G Suite to Zendesk, so the right info appears in the same place.

Business leaders and admins get to build their own Slack-based knowledge bases, complete with troubleshooting guides and FAQs.

On the other hand, users just need to ask Guru a question to quickly track down the insights they need.

You’ll never need to worry about confused and under-informed contractors again.

5 — Askspoke

Askspoke is a popular intercompany collaboration tool used by brands like Glossier and AllBirds.

With Askspoke, you get a simple way for employees to file requests with team leaders, IT experts, and managers.

Essentially, if any member of your external team has any questions, you can find them on Askspoke.

You can add knowledge base responses so the integrated AI can generate an automatic response for your users instantly.

There’s also the option to loop other specialists in your team into the question with a quick @Mention.

Askspoke can accelerate everything from onboarding to problem resolution for any team — both internal and external.

6 — Jinie

Jinie for Microsoft Teams ensures everyone can get work done without having to wait for extra support.

The Jinie chatbot instantly handles inbound queries using information from your company knowledge base.

What’s more, it can integrate with your HR tools to handle things like leave management and absences too.

The Jinie bot comes with tools to help you to store and manage personal identity documents for contractors, freelancers, and suppliers.

It’s a must-have for today’s distributed teams.

7 — Priority Matrix

Do you ever have trouble keeping your entire project team focused on the right tasks?

Priority Matrix is a free project management app from Appfluence Inc created to help with exactly this problem.

This Microsoft Teams-ready tool is a feature-rich software ideal for helping people to work smarter (not harder).

With this add-on, you can manage tasks and projects within Teams, crucial surface tasks based on an upcoming deadline, and even set up notifications to keep all parties focused without the need to constantly check in.

Priority Matrix also comes with useful integrations for Microsoft Office 365.

With this tool, you can reduce context switching, save time and resources, and ensure everyone outside your workforce is on the same page as everyone inside your workforce.

8 — Approval Studio

Approval Studio is an application created for any company frequently working with external talent in the form of specialists, contractors, and consultants.

This app, which integrates with Slack, keeps all of your projects from different contractors in the same place, so you don’t have to rely on email or cloud storage.

As businesses now work with external employees from across the globe, Approval Studio can help with your language barriers too.

You can type instructions for a specialist in your own language and the recipient can instantly translate your message into one of seven languages.

Approval Studio tracks project progress in real-time, allows you to examine submissions from contract workers side-by-side and even comes with a comparison mode so you can see how something has evolved over the course of a project.

This also allows you to send reports to any stakeholder to show them the value of working with external experts.

9 — HeyTaco!

Another tough part of working with a diverse team of contractors, suppliers, and external experts is that it’s hard to develop a reliable culture.

Now, creating a culture isn’t something that can be dictated. It can be lead, but for the most part, it develops organically.

When you’re working with team members in the same office, it’s easy to forget that distributed employees and external parties can also thrive off recognition and team-building.

HeyTaco! is a stand-alone app or Slack solution currently helping more than 5,000 teams develop better communities when bringing in new contractors or partners.

It gives you a neat way to show appreciation to your team and bring people close together.

You can send “tacos” as a thank you whenever someone does something useful in your project.

Or you can send tacos to your best-performing resellers and channel partners when they progress a deal.

The leaderboard shows how many tacos a person gets in a month — so you can introduce gamification between your internal and external sales teams.

10 — Stormboard

Available to integrate with both Microsoft Teams and Slack, Stormboard is a whiteboard for distributed teams.

It combines the power of sticky notes and templated brainstorming sessions to help share ideas and insights between people inside and outside of your team.

Export PowerPoint documents, PDFs, and Word files to a cloud environment for contractors and suppliers to access with ease.

You can even use Stormboard to aggregate all of the information for an important meeting, so the people you connect with have context for your upcoming conversation.

Since many distributed teams are often concerned about the privacy and security of the tools that they use, Stormboard has that covered too…

All the data transferred to external individuals through the cloud is encrypted with Transport Layer Security.

Stormboard makes meetings, remote collaboration, and project management easier than ever.

Bonus (11) — ClickUp

There’s one more intercompany collaboration tool that I found last minute and felt I had to include.

Designed to support contractors and freelancers around the world as they struggle to keep track of the tasks that they need to complete, ClickUp works as both a standalone tool and a Slack add-on.

Used in Slack, ClickUp lets you create tasks from comments and messages, as well as giving you the opportunity to assign projects to specific people outside of your team.

You can also send direct notifications through Slack whenever someone has a new job to complete.

ClickUp comes with deadlines to ensure contractors never miss a crucial project.

You can also add various files and documents to each assignment, to ensure everyone is well-informed before they start working.

Intercompany Online Collaboration Tools Conclusion

Thanks for reading this post. Hopefully, you’ll find these intercompany collaboration tools useful for joining up your experience when you chat with contacts outside your organization.

Don’t forget!

Mio Universal Channels for Microsoft Teams with Slack or Webex Teams is now live!

Perfect for intercompany collaboration, you’ll be able to stay in Teams and send messages to your contractors, suppliers, or clients that use Slack or Webex.

They stay in their platform too and Mio translates the messages across platform.

It’s not just messages that are supported! GIFs, emojis, channels, and message edits/deletes are all supported.

If this sounds like something you need, try Mio free here.