At Interspace, we work hard to make our clients happy. But it’s not just about giving them the right product—it’s also about cultivating a positive relationship with them.
We work hard to cultivate these relationships because they help us learn more about our clients—and the more we know about them, the better we can serve them.
We take pride in our ability to build these relationships and foster a positive working environment for all parties involved.
Interspace is a company that works to make its clients happy, and part of that is building up good relationships. The more we know about our clients, the better we can serve them!
Collaborative Content Creation Tools
Producing high-quality content is never a one-person job.
It takes different minds across various teams coming together to share content ideas and collaborate over content creation, review, and distribution.
Even if your content team has one person running the show, they’ll need a defined process to coordinate with people from other teams, document their processes, and create a library-like home for all the content they’re churning out.
All this points to one thing: the need for content collaboration or the process of handling everything involved in content production and distribution in one place.
But how exactly do you coordinate all your content activities in one place? This piece explains how. We’ll walk you through exactly what content collaboration is, why your team needs it, and the tools that can help facilitate it.
What is content collaboration?
Content collaboration is the process of organising, creating, managing, and sharing content within a system that keeps the entire workflow streamlined and accessible.
Depending on your content operation, collaboration over the different stages of content production can look anything from chaos to a well-organised, efficient process that supports quality content production and distribution.
But, why bother with ensuring your content collaboration process is a slick one? Let’s answer this next.
Why content collaboration is important for content teams?
A defined space to communicate and coordinate content activities helps teams create a well-oiled content engine that produces quality content at scale. Here’s how:
Improved content quality
Good content is never created in silos. Instead, it requires teamwork to think up content topics, create product-led content, polish pieces, and so on.
For example, content ideation and creation need input from customer-facing and product teams. Content teams also need to communicate among themselves on writing, editing, and publishing.
Having a single collaboration software for working together on all these activities supports optimal communication and, with it, better quality content production.
Need to know: The GatherContent platform allows you to get everyone on the same page with cloud based, real-time content collaboration.
Better content accessibility
With all your content (from the style guide to the published drafts) in one place, content comes more accessible to one and all.
Typically, without a collaboration system/place to coordinate, you and your team will find yourselves snacking through various folders and email threads to pull out the needed content.
For example, writers will need to hunt down pieces they’ve to link in their drafts internally. Customer-facing teams will also slow down as they spend time finding content to reference for answering queries.
This slows down things even more when you’ve to ask another teammate for a post and wait for their response.
Enhanced remote team collaboration
For remote teams, in particular, online collaboration is essential for creating content in real-time in a well-defined workflow.
For instance, writers, content managers, and editors can work on a draft in one place – minimizing the need for endless back and forth.
Faster content production
And, finally, with better content accessibility and collaboration in a centralised platform, content teams can be more productive.
To add, by laying all the steps in a workflow, teams can work with deadlines. This makes production predictable and increases production volume to meet the ever-increasing demand for more content.
💡 See also: eBook:Techniques for collaboratively prioritising content
Content collaboration tools
Now, to reap all these benefits of content collaboration, your team needs to leverage tools that promote communication and streamline workflow.
Essentially, these tools provide the necessary infrastructure to facilitate efficient content operation.
Here are some content collaboration tools worth adding to your content toolkit. (Notice we left out GatherContent — we’ll be highlighting it next.)
- Slack
Slack is an instant messaging tool offering multiple integrations and the option to share files. It’s a helpful tool for document sharing, communicating over processes like brainstorming ideas, exchanging notes, and discussing strategy. - Zoom
This is a video communication platform that helps you connect with teammates over audio and video calls. For instance, editors and writers on the team can use it to exchange complicated feedback synchronously. - Google Drive
An alternative to the Microsoft OneDrive, the Google Drive umbrella packs in tools like Google Docs and Google Sheets for creating shareable documents that you can work on with your team in real-time.
Using the privacy setting functionality, you can also change documents’ accessibility to make them public to particular team members, giving them the option to edit, view, or comment. Plus, you can use Google Drive for document management by organising files into folders.
- Dropbox
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that offers secure file hosting and sharing. All you’ve to do is to upload files and save them in folders. File sync is another option that the SaaS company offers so you can sync content across devices.
You can also share files and folders, including sensitive data with relevant folks using shareable links or by adding them to a file using their email address. To add, the folder permissions option gives you a choice between providing people viewing or editing permission.
- Trello
Lastly, Trello is a Kanban-style project management software for organising and communicating over content with your team.
You can use it as a central repository for ready content and tracking content in various production stages (writing, editing, reviewing, and publishing, for example).
How GatherContent facilitates content collaboration
In contrast with the tools shared above, GatherContent offers a collaboration platform for all the moving pieces involved in content production. From co-working in a single document to getting a visual overview of your production and content schedule, GatherContent makes content collaboration effortless.
Briefly, here’s what GatherContent offers:
An easily accessible content repository for all your content documents, including style guides, published posts, and briefing templates. This way, everyone can quickly get their hands on the files they need.
Streamlined collaboration through each content stage – from leaving feedback in comments in a draft to publishing it without redoing the formatting.
A visual overview of a project’s status. At one glance, you can tell what’s in progress, what’s under review, and so on.
Let’s elaborate.
Document your processes
With GatherContent, you can create a library of templates for all the processes involved in your content workflow, such as templates for email content, blog content, and social media captioning, to name a few.
As an example, let’s take briefs for blog content. Using a template in GatherContent, you can break down a lengthy brief document into sections with embedded in-line guidelines for each section.
A blank content template in GatherContent, pointing out guidelines, character limits and structured content fields
Drag and drop fields to create a structured template, building a library of common content types for any type of content you need to gather.
This makes it easy for all collaborators to understand what’s needed from them, helping speed up production.
Not to mention, all the centralised documentation improves production consistency. Ultimately, by making content governance a breeze for you, GatherContent helps significantly improve your content quality.
Collaborate on content, planning, creation, and review
Using GatherContent, you can easily assign, review, and publish various content projects – all in one place.
With your briefs ready in the platform, simply assign them to writers – complete with due dates to stick with your schedule.
Writers can then work on drafts within the templated documents, leaving them for review when ready by tagging the manager/editor. Feedback happens in one place too as editors leave inline comments – speeding up content reviews.
As for publishing? GatherContent takes care of that as well. All you have to do is integrate it with your Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. This will let you import the final documents (posts, pages, media, and more) into your CMS without losing formatting.
Not only does all of this reduce work on your plate, but it also helps you publish faster and scale production without compromising on quality.
Streamline your workflow
By collaborating over content using GatherContent, you can easily track your workflow by seeing all active projects in your dashboard. More importantly, you can get their progress status by looking at the colored circle beside each project.
Dashboard view in GatherContent of an active projects content workflow
In your GatherContent dashboard you can see the status of all your projects at every stage of the workflow.
To top that, the Calendar view offers a birds-eye view of the production schedule so you can tell what’s in your content pipeline at a given time.
Example GatherContent Content Calendar – showing a team’s content schedule
Use the GatherContent content calendar to easily plan content assignments and deadlines for your entire team.
This way, you don’t have to chase people for project updates.
Convinced you need a platform for streamlined ops, faster production, and better content quality? Improve your team’s content collaboration with a free trial of GatherContent.
market guide for content collaboration tools
We all produce and share a plethora of content every day. Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created! Thanks to our businesses becoming more digitally inclined, we are constantly sharing our files- documents PDFs, sales decks, project proposals, training material, HR guidelines, etc. with our co-workers via email, Slack, internal wikis, cloud storage services, etc.
Apart from sharing work-related content, businesses are regularly creating marketing and sales collateral like social media images, company logos, videos, blog posts and articles, podcasts, infographics, etc. to please the ever-increasing hunger for new content on social media.
However, all of this massive amount of content being shared on a daily basis creates a big problem for businesses. Even though creating and sharing content is an integral part of any business, the problem arises when you have to store this content or worse, find it.
According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information! Shocking, right?
Think about it- your content is often scattered all over the place on your digital devices. You may have files stored in cloud apps like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, files stored on your desktop, email attachments, and so on. With our content present at multiple places, how do you plan on locating, accessing, and sharing it quickly and getting work done on time?
The Rise Of Content Collaboration Platforms
We have all been there- searching for that important file in your massively populated inbox, browsing through hundreds of folders, searching through your cloud apps, or your laptop’s download folder is no fun.
Employees often can’t find the right content at the right time or can’t access the content due to time or location barriers. All of these add ups to a big loss of time and productivity.
If you too are struggling with similar issues, a content collaboration platform is a thing you need! A content collaboration platform helps organizations keep all of their content, media files, and documents in one place for easy storage and retrieval. No more hunting down email, browsing through folders, and worse, no more shoulder tapping!
Sounds good enough? So let’s take a look at some of the best content collaboration platforms out there and see which one would be perfect for your team!
Top Content Collaboration Platforms For Businesses
Content Collaboration Platform #1: Bit.ai
Bit.ai: Content collaboration toolBit is a new age cloud-based document collaboration and content collaboration platform. Bit helps teams collaborate on interactive documents, store digital assets and track their documents.
Bit’s interactive documents allow teams to work collaboratively in one place where they can bring in various types of digital content inside the document. Digital assets like PDF, cloud files, videos, audios, spreadsheets, etc. can be added inside of these interactive documents.
Bit.ai Home Page CTA
As teams work together their information is stored inside of workspaces, making it easy for teams to not worry about sharing permissions and have access to all the information they need.
Bit has a central content hub known as the content library. It is a smart way to save your digital content in one central location. Bit is reimagining digital content storage by allowing you to add any type of content from anywhere. Now you can bring together files, images, rich embeds and weblinks into one central repository.
Content Collaboration Platform #2: Google Drive
Google drive: Content collaboration platform
Google Drive is Google’s cloud storage service where you can store your documents, files, audio, videos- basically anything. You can access your files stored in Google Drive from anywhere and from any device, as long as you know the login details!
Google Drive offers free 15GB of cloud storage to store all your documents, spreadsheets, and media files but you can always upgrade in case you need more.
Google Drive also provides you with various control options over who can view, comment and edit your files. You can share your files with anyone who has an access link to it. If you want to co-edit a Google file your collaborators must have a Google account.
Content Collaboration Platform #3: ProofHub
ProofHub: Content collaboration tool
ProofHub is a cloud-based team collaboration and project management tool that offers an inbuilt File Management software for users to create, upload, organize, and collaborate on all their files and documents in a centralized location. Also, you can attach files and documents to tasks, discussions, chats, and notes whenever needed.
With ProofHub, you can restrict unauthorized access to your files by sharing links only with people you choose to. Seamless integration with Google Drive and other apps allow you to access your files from anywhere, on any device. The Online proofing tool allows you to review, proof, and annotate files with markup tools.
Team members can also share their feedback by adding comments, suggestions, or editing your documents.
The best thing about ProofHub is that the tool offers a wide range of features under one virtual roof to help you manage most, if not all aspects of your work.
Content Collaboration Platform #4: Dropbox
Dropbox: Content collaboration platformDropbox offers cloud storage to keep all your files in one place. It also offers desktop clients and mobile apps to keep all your files in sync and within reach. Dropbox offers free synchronization between desktop, cloud, and mobile.
With Dropbox, you can instantly send files or folders to those inside or outside of your organization with shared links. You can also gather feedback on the files you share and invite your team to edit files together.
Dropbox allows integrations with over 100,000 third-party apps, making it a cloud storage workhorse. The free account starts out with a 2GB storage capacity which is way lower than what Google Drive or other services offer.
Content Collaboration Platform #5: Confluence
Confluence: Content collaboration platformAtlassian Confluence is a content collaboration platform that allows your team to create, store and share documents from one dashboard. Confluence allows users to easily publish, organize, and access company information in one central location so you can help your customers help themselves.
Team members can store content such as PDFs, docs, images, track every version and change made to a page, and connect to Jira to provide insight into their development work with automatic linking, quick issue creation, and reports.
Team members can also leave feedback on documents with inline, file, and page comments, without getting lost in your email threads or chat messages.
If your team already uses Jira and HipChat by Atlassian, Confluence can turn out to be a good add-on.
Read more: What is Workplace Collaboration & How To Do It Right!
Content Collaboration Platform #6: BoostHQ
BoostHq: Content collaboration platform
Another worthy content collaboration platform is BoostHQ, which allows organizations to create, share, and centralize internal knowledge and content. BoostHQ helps employees organize company knowledge by groups, categories, and tags, which makes the process of information search and retrieval quick and easy.
Features like “employee discussions” allow employees to share their thoughts and experiences, capturing and retaining their knowledge for future reference.
Employees can share various types of content like PDF, text, images, or videos into different groups and make it accessible to their peers. Robust analytics gives you intelligent insights into what’s the most popular content in the organization and who’s the most active members.
Using BoostHQ’s Chrome Extensions, employees can easily share links and videos, right from their browser on any device.
Content Collaboration Platform #7: Box
Box: Content collaboration platformBox is a cloud service specially designed for businesses and the IT sector to share, edit and secure files over the cloud. Box allows seamlessly transfer of data from your PC to the Box cloud. You can invite teammates to collaborate, join in on any conversation, or edit files together for better results and understanding.
You can control who can view, share, edit and upload files, giving you a lot of security and privacy options and send large files quickly over the cloud.
Box recently introduced Box notes, a collaborative note-taking app free for Box users. Notes let you collaboratively edit notes with your team, with basic formatting tools and the ability to add comments.
Read more: 10 Writing Tools That Rule The Content Marketing World
Content Collaboration Platform #8: Alfresco
Alfresco: Content collaboration platform
Alfresco is an Enterprise Document Management System aimed to make your workflow smooth and streamlined. Its core offering, a Digital Business Platform lets IT develop modern solutions for an efficient workflow. Alfresco provides all the necessary features for creating, editing and storing documents.
Features like version-control allow you to access and view the most recent and previous versions of a document. Users can either store their files and documents in the system or in the Alfresco cloud.
Teams can collaborate and communicate effectively with features like project wikis, task lists, and activity feeds. Alfresco’s mobile apps available for both Android and iOS allows users to view and share documents on the fly, making it truly flexible and accessible.
Content Collaboration Platform #9: M-Files
M-files: Content collaboration platform
M-Files aim to change the way the world access information.
As a professional, you have various forms of data residing in numerous desktop and cloud applications. You can have your client data in Salesforce or a word document in Goole Drive or Dropbox, or other company assets like jpegs, videos, PDFs, presentations, etc all reside on different platforms.
This makes it extremely difficult to find that one piece of information when you need it the most.
M-Files solves that problem by virtually creating a single access point for all your data online. You can just tag the file, fill in the metadata and hit save. M-files will be able to easily locate it and let you know whenever there is duplication. M-Files claims to provide enterprise-level security and keeps your data safe.
Content Collaboration Platform #10: Microsoft Onedrive
Microsoft Onedrive: Content collaboration platform
Microsoft’s answer to GoogleDrive is OneDrive, a safe and secure cloud storage service. OneDrive allows users to save files and photos to OneDrive and get them from any device, anywhere.
Microsoft provides secure ways to share and collaborate on content with coworkers and colleagues, both inside and outside your organization, thereby improving productivity and efficiency.
OneDrive is included with Office 365 and thus, enables you to seamlessly co-author Office documents across the browser, mobile, and desktop apps. You can even make edits to your files offline and Microsoft automatically uploads the changes next time you connect.
Content Collaboration Platform #11: Citrix ShareFile
Citrix sharefile: Content collaboration platform
Citrix ShareFile is a new file storage service by digital workspace giant Citrix. Citrix file storage and sharing are especially aimed at enterprise companies wanting to share large files in the safest and secure way possible.
A secure managed file transfer (MFT) software, Sharefile is extremely useful for companies who need to store and share highly sensitive data and proprietary information.
Starting at $16/month, Sharefile provides world-class security, password protection, intuitive interface and easy integration with third-party storage services such as Google Drive, SharePoint, Box, and Dropbox, making it one of the best MFT tools on this list.
Content Collaboration Platform #12: Bitrix24
Bitrix24: Content collaboration platform
Bitrix24 acts as a “social intranet” for your company. It takes inspiration from the social networking style of communication and allows users to make social profiles, add their information and images, instant message one another, share content, like updates and activities, comment on posts, and collaborate and communicate with each other using the activity stream.
Bitrix24 provides tools for workplace collaboration, task management, document sharing, project management, CRM, email automation, workflow management, lead capture, and time tracking integrated into a social interface for maximum efficiency. There are also mobile apps available to use Bitrix24 anytime, anywhere.
Filled up to the brim with everything a business needs to get work done, Bitrix24 can sometimes turn out to be overwhelming. If you need a more streamlined tool to focus only on managing documents and organizational information, without the plethora of features, you might wanna look elsewhere.
Conclusion
So there you have it, a list of some of the best content collaboration platforms on the market today. The goal of a content collaboration platform is to bring together an organizations’ useful yet fragmented pieces of content together and make it available to all the employees of an organization in a systematic manner. Don’t lag behind and start deploying a content collaboration platform today!
Conclusion
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