If you’re thinking that the work-from-home scenario made mandatory by the coronavirus is coming to a close, think again. A recent surge in reported infections means that a “round 2” of the illness is in full swing, which for most businesses will mean that employees will need to stay away from the office for several more months, likely through the end of the year. Given that reality, many businesses are considering making some percentage of their staff permanently remote for a variety of factors, including office facilities costs and increased efficiencies. So if you cobbled together some software tools to help those workers perform their jobs from home during the initial outbreak of corona, it’s time to get serious and permanent about your remote access tool kit.
Fortunately, the software world wasn’t caught entirely unprepared for this situation. The drive for digital transformation of 2018 and 2019 had already given rise to several kinds of new tools designed to more closely connect workers in different geographic areas, particularly in the categories of online collaboration and project management. PCMag Labs reviewed dozens of these tools over the past several years, and based on those experiences, these are our top picks for any business looking to build a solid foundation of remote work tools.
Slack for Seamless Communications
Slack is a PCMag Editors’ Choice for online communication and a market leader among business messaging apps because it’s highly intuitive while still having a surprising feature depth. At its core, this app is purely about fast, easy, and focused communication between team members. It’s highly customizable and plays well with others meaning it has plenty of pre-canned software and service integrations available and also makes developing your own fairly easy.
During our review, we were able to get up and running with the product very quickly and were also able to access its more advanced features easily, including the ability to assign discussion channels to business topics, conduct rudimentary video calls, as well as install and leverage several rich integrations allowing users to access apps like Google Analytics, directly from the Slack UI. For most small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and even larger enterprises, we found Slack to be a well-balanced and effective communications solution that can be deployed very quickly and easily along with the ability to aid or even supplant a local phone system through features like video calling, business messaging, and even file-sharing and collaboration features.
Readers agree with these conclusions giving Slack a Business Choice award in 2019. Slack continues to evolve with new desktop and mobile apps that make collaboration and communication between teams more intuitive. Be warned, however, that Slack’s price tag is significantly higher than that of many of its competitors, though its ease of use alone will make those dollars worth it for many businesses. Also make sure that you understand what Slack does and doesn’t promise to deliver before adopting it for your team. It’s an excellent place for conversations and discussion, but if you’re looking to manage projects, tasks, and workflows, you need more than Slack alone, which means continuing to build and test your remote working tool set.
Zoom Meetings for Easy, High-End Web Meetings
Slack may have the integrated ability to do basic video calling, but that’s a far cry from what a dedicated video conferencing solution can do for you. If you read recent news on Zoom, this web meeting solution has profited greatly from a massive demand surge due to the pandemic. However, that fast growth has came with growing pains: everything from Zoom-bombings that required security upgrades (they’re easily prevented now), to more recent reports that free use of the service may come at the cost privacy.
For business users, however, Zoom Meetings has been an Editors’ Choice winner in the web video conferencing category since early 2019 due not only to a competitive set of features but, again, noticeable ease of use. For example, users don’t need to download a client to access all of Zoom’s features, just click a link to join a call with full capabilities. What really sets Zoom apart from its direct competitors, though, is easy access to what other web meeting tools would call more advanced features; things like the ability to add or blur backgrounds, precise video and audio controls, and easy scalability for large groups so you can conduct not only meetings but learning classes and webinars, too, all through the same tool.
Zoom is an easy and polished conferencing contender and this has made it popular with consumers looking for a quick way to stay in touch with family members; but it’s also been an important benefit for businesses who’ve had to pivot quickly to keep key processes and communications running smoothly no matter where employees, partners, or customers might now be located. Zoom fulfills that need and does so with no-fuss connectivity fleshed out by top-notch performance, affordability, and a generous selection of free plans.
Microsoft OneDrive for Business for Data Storage and Safety
One of the most difficult problems to predict, let alone solve, in the new normal of remote work is the issue of not just organized data sharing, but also data safety. Employing an easily accessed, flexible, and reliable business-grade cloud storage and file sharing solution has essentially become a must-have for those working under pandemic conditions as it’s one of very few ways to ensure all your organization’s documents are distributed properly with role-based access sharing controls intact while keeping data backed-up, accessible, and secure.
Microsoft OneDrive for Business is a leader among business file sharing solutions and easily one of our favorites in the category. This Editors’ Choice winner competes closely with similar players, especially Google Drive Enterprise and Dropbox Business among many others. But OneDrive for Business edged ahead in our testing partially due to a competitive pricing structure, but also because it offers excellent integrations to Microsoft’s deep portfolio of business productivity apps. And even if you’re not using any of these, OneDrive is still an excellent standalone file sharing solution both from a collaborative and a security perspective.
The solution begins at $5 per user per month on a yearly plan, includes one terabyte (TB) of storage, the ability to store files of up to 15 GB in size, share files securely inside and even outside an organization, and the ability to sync local copies of files or folders for offline viewing. It is an ideal companion for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) already invested in Microsoft solutions especially Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft Teams, But even without other Microsoft software to back it up, Microsoft has given OneDrive enough feature depth across data and user security, file sharing and collaboration, and even backup, to make it worth the money for most businesses all by itself.
NCP Secure Entry Client for Business VPN Tunnels
PCMag Labs has always considered Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) essential tools for mobile workers that need to access business data from the road, and that importance has only increased for those stuck in long-term remote work situations. While VPN services, such as NordVPN, are likely the most popular choice for consumers, businesses actually have more options because they have more factors to consider. This includes not just whether traffic streams are protected by VPN tunnels, but how those tunnels are connecting to the corporate network, and a service isn’t always the best way to do that.
That’s where universal VPN clients can help, like the NCP Secure Entry Client for Win32/64. This is a strong, enterprise-focused, all-around VPN suite that includes clients for virtually any operating system and remote access architectures. It’s our Editors Choice selection for business-grade VPNs for that reason and because it includes a VPN server that can integrate with many of the existing hardware VPN gateways that businesses might have already deployed. It also has a management component that makes deployment, administration, and debugging of VPN connections very easy and straightforward. That’s about as good as it gets for enterprise VPN systems, so if you’re still shopping for the VPN component of your remote working tool set, this solution is definitely worth a close look.
Asana for Tracking Teams, Tasks, and Projects
Keeping employees productive in the age of the coronavirus has certainly become more complicated. Suddenly, managers need to be much more focused on making sure workers stay social, engaged, and connected to the rest of the team. But they also can’t lose focus of tasks, deadlines, and task ownership. That’s where Asana comes in.
This Editors’ Choice winner combines the best of online collaboration with project- and team-oriented task tracking and time management. It’s an all-in-one people and project management tool that’s available as an easily-deployed and fairly simple to learn web service. While PCMag Labs has tested some similar tools that might say they’re easier to use, that’s a close race and none of them have more feature depth than Asana. This is the gold standard for team and task management and should definitely be a contender for companies that are still struggling with remote work management issues.
Asana takes into account shifting time schedules and flexible work hours, and it maintains the flow of communication now that teams are distributed not just with internal features but through a long list of integrations with other tools, too, especially Slack (above). Teams and project memberships are easily maintained in a thoughtful overall design that we found intuitive and nicely interactive. There’s even a free version that makes evaluation easy.
Asana’s flexibility, extensive feature set, and variety of workflow views are also important mentions, but for businesses that need to deploy an effective solution quickly, likely its most important points aside from feature depth, are exemplary ease of use, an affordable subscription pricing model, and the easy deployment it offers because it’s a web service.
