5 great cloud based tools to help keep your team organised

Here’s five simple yet powerful cloud based tools to help you organise 5 critical areas of your business.

Basecamp: to organise your team

Basecamp was once a famously easy to use project management tool, but has now morphed into a team collaboration tool. It remains incredibly easy to use and effective with wonderfully simple pricing.

One of the coolest features that helps keep your team engaged is the Automatic Check-ins feature which encourages staff (remote and local) to answer simple questions on a regular basis, such as “What are you working on this week?” and “What did you work on today?” It’s a great way to surface ideas and insights that are usually locked away in people’s heads or kick off discussions based on people’s answers.

Basecamp is a great way to keep your whole team up to date and working together: basecamp.com

Highrise: to organise your correspondence

Highrise is a simple easy to use tool to organise your contacts, correspondence and follow-up tasks.

A great feature is that you can just forward any email you receive from a contact to your Highrise dropbox and it will automatically file it against the contact in Highrise.

This is a huge productivity boost and you’ll always be able to find correspondence with any contact. You can also set up pre-defined email templates to save you time writing repetitive emails. This enables you to use Highrise as a support solution by centralising all your inbound and outbound support emails.

Highrise is great for anyone wanting an easy to use solution to better manage communications: highrisehq.com

Editors note: As of 2025 Highrise while still operating is not accepting new customers.

Brandkit: to organise your marketing content

Brandkit is a place where you can store and organise all your brand and marketing files, such as images, logos, brochures, videos, etc.

It’s easy to upload and organise your files with tags.

Then because everything is in one secure place in the cloud, you can find and share with others or download and use instantly. Everything is accessible via browser on your PC, smartphone or tablet – anywhere, anytime.

Brandkit is designed especially to handle your brand and marketing files. Benefits of Brandkit over something like Dropbox or Google Drive, is that you can allow self-service access to your files via a public portal and restrict what files each user has access to based on Asset Licences and User Roles.

In addition, Brandkit automatically attaches Brand Guidelines to user downloads, tracks usage and can automatically notify users if you update a file.

Brandkit is a great option if you are having trouble finding, using and sharing your marketing content: {brandkit.com](/)

Google Drive: to organise your documents

If you want to go paperless in your office or just make all your documents, bills and other paperwork searchable, Google Drive is hard to beat.

Google Drive offers an advantage over other cloud storage services in that it indexes your files the same way Google does the Web, to make everything you save there searchable.

As with similar cloud-based storage services, you can share files and folders with other people. Files are marked private by default and are shared only when you decide to share them. You can access your files through a browser, or offline in a synced folder.

If you combine it with a good desktop scanner, scan and upload to your Google Drive account (which indexes each scanned document), you can potentially achieve Paperless nirvana.

Google Drive is a simple yet powerful way to organise your documents and make them searchable and shareable: Google Drive

Trello: to organise your projects

Trello is a collaboration tool that organises your projects into sections called boards.

In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. It’s easy to understand what’s happening with tasks organised into visual boards and individual tasks.

As the project progresses, you can just drag a task from one board to the next, until complete. Very simple and effective.

You can also invite contractors and clients to collaborate on projects. A great way to give your clients insights about project progress.

Trello is a great tool for organising and managing projects and getting things done: trello.com

Remember there’s no “i” in team.

To make these tools effective, you need everyone on board and using them.

Good luck and Happy Organising :)