At the AEA/CDC Summer Evaluation Institute, over 150 attendees went to a session on Low-cost/No-cost Tools for Evaluators. Here are some of the great ideas on collaborative tools recommended from the audience.
Microsoft SharePoint: SharePoint is a web application platform that provides a centralized collaborative hub for web content management. This includes management of documents, collaboration spaces, and social networking tools. SharePoint is free with Windows Server http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/, with paid premium options available. Recommended by: Michele Fontaine
Huddle: Huddle is a web application that is known for being a popular alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. Like SharePoint, Huddle provides document management, file sharing, meeting organization, and other collaborative tools. Huddle is as low as $15 per user per month http://www.huddle.com/ Recommended by: Carol Petrucci
Microsoft LiveMeeting: LiveMeeting is Microsoft’s hosted web conferencing platform that offers an alternative to competing services, such as WebEx and GoToMeeting. It provides options for presenter/attendee interactivity (e.g., desktop sharing), multi-party video streams, and virtual session management. LiveMeeting is $4.50 per user per month http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/live-meeting/ Recommended by: Valarie Underwood
Salesforce (with Dimdim): Dimdim was a software offering that provided a collaborative hub where users could share desktops, show slides, chat, and more. Dimdim was recently acquired by the popular customer relation management (CRM) and cloud computing company, Salesforce. Salesforce ranges in price from $2 – $250 per user per month http://www.salesforce.com/ Recommended by: Jessie Rouder and Alicia Moag-Stahlberg
Google Sites: Google Sites is Google’s web page creation suite that is part of their Google Apps productivity suite. Google Sites’ structure allows for the creation of highly collaborative pages, including wiki pages. Collaborators can jointly add content to a site, subscribe to site changes, and more. Sites can be made public for increased transparency, or private if the content calls for it. Google Sites is free http://sites.google.com Recommended by: Summer DeBastiani
Google Translator: All of the above mentioned tools are great–as long as there are no language barrier between collaborators. In the event that there are, Google Translate offers one of the most advanced and accurate language translation engines–even allowing for automatic translation of web pages with certain plugins/browsers. Google Translate is free http://translate.google.com/ Recommended by: Neil Walsh
More to come soon!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.