If you’re thinking your typical business partners (e.g. co-founder, suppliers, affiliates, investor etc), then I’d say “any other partners in your life?”

I know some people don’t like the use of the term partner for their spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, defacto, wife, husband love of their life, soul mate or all of the above but I thought it looked good in the title. Now, I hope I haven’t scared you off yet, It gets better… I think.

This weekend gone ……

Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees.  I was on another conference call this week with some business partners in India and it occured to me the ease with which I could collaborate with people around the globe now.  Email is obvious but there are so many other great, and quite often free, tools available to be able to communicate and collaborate.  I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the tools that I can’t live without.

• Skype.  This may be a little obvious, but I love skype.  The ease, the flexibility, the price!  There are other tools out there as well that all let you conduct voice or video calls like Google talk and Microsoft’s live messenger.  They’re all great.  For some reason I use Skype.  You can pick your own.
• Google docs is amazing.  You can write, store, share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and pdfs.  You should definitely check this out as it’s great to be able to be simulataneously editing a document while chatting with someone across the globe on Skype.  It’s also great because Google are continuously improving it and it’s getting better every day.
• Acrobat.com is also great.  They’re building a suite of web base document tools that you can use for collaboration.  I must admit that I don’t really use these but they do look a lot nicer than Google docs.  What I do use though is the screen sharing tool.  This thing is great and it’s free!  It allows you to share your screen with anyone who has an internet connection and a web browser.  Again there are a number of other options available but I don’t know that I’ve found any that are free.  One that comes to mind is GoToMeeting, however I don’t think this one is free.

Just a quick post.  Hope these tools are useful.  If you’ve got any others that you think are great then please feel free to post a comment.

**Update**

Just thinking after this post that you should make sure that you’re comfortable with the terms of service for any of these services.  Sometimes the owner of the service may be taking ownership of your content if you use the service.  An example of the different approaches are the google docs and google docs for google apps terms of service.  Make sure you read and understand if you’re using these tools for business (and even personal) use.