Free software to help organisations cope during Coronavirus times
Channel chat apps
The merge of Email & Chat apps was born to Slack. Here are key features:
Microsoft Teams has these similar Slack-like features but is laid out differently.
Online meeting software
Calendy now has free integrations with Zoom & Go to meeting. Calendy cuts out the back & forth on where/when to meet. People can book in a meeting through a link and it integrates with your Google & Outlook calendar to prevent double booking and each user sees times in their own timezone. It has advanced preferences e.g. don’t book another meeting with 24 hours from now, allow 30 min buffer time between meetings, block out working hours etc. Microsoft Bookings comes built into Microsoft 365 E1 license which is also free, and also allows customers to book via a bookings page.
HR, promo videos & HR
Clarity Wave (a cloud HR service providing 360 ̊ employee surveys & other tools) is offering 3 months free access.
Vincit California is giving struggling small businesses the opportunity to apply for and receive a customized ecommerce strategy, design & technical advice and free 1 on 1’s with ecommerce developers.
Sparkhouse is creating free promotional videos for small shops to get important information out to their community and how people can currently access their valuable products & services.
Conference calling
Google’s Hangouts meets premium version is free until 30 September, Microsoft Teams calling, as part of Microsoft 365 E1 is free for 6 months. Both have the benefits of being well integrated with the general infrastructure the suite provides so they have more advanced chat & file sharing resources, they also are offering webinar style broadcasting for one was streaming to thousands of subscribers and meeting recordings, Microsoft’s offer goes the furthest with the ability to transcribe the meeting and make it searchable by everyone else after. The free versions of Google Meets & Microsoft Teams now support video meeting calls too.
Citrix WebEx has lifted their usual 40 minute cut off on the free plan, Zoom has done the same for schools and/or certain countries for all. These two-offer advanced functionality like breakout rooms (split participants into multiple smaller sessions then organiser can come in & out), raising a hand (which alerts the host so a muted participant can ask a question easily), plus extra controls by the organiser over participants (over muting/unmuting, showing/hiding video) and several options for how each viewer sees other participants.
All applications offer screen sharing and polling, a whiteboard (where all participants can brainstorm, draw/type etc.) and all besides Meets, have a waiting room (where a host can let participants in one by one) and meeting notes features. Note, we haven’t extensively tested every app to the same level so if one feature is accidentally not mentioned please check.
Advanced screen sharing & recording
TechSmith Video Review, the market leader in screen recording & video editing software is free until 30 June, as is Snagit which allows advanced screenshot editing, perfect for tutorial guides.
Teams, Meets, WebEx & Zoom offer screen sharing including has advanced screen sharing
Full suites
Atlassian at first expanded its free offering including Jira Software (for project management), Confluence (for document collaboration), Jira Service Desk (for customer support tickets) and Jira Core (for workflow), however since then it has started offering its entire Standard Plan suite for free for a full year.
Microsoft 365 E1 license is free for 6 months which includes:
As a final warning, if you sign up now you may be stuck in future so its worth considering before making any purchase!
The merge of Email & Chat apps was born to Slack. Here are key features:
- Create channels with certain team members. E.g. the “Sales” team could have members A, B and F, the operations team could have members C, D and E but then and the “Farming project” could include members from both e.g. A, C, D and F
- React to each message with any emoji or even add your own custom one
- Messages can then be made into a thread with replies
- Integration with any of 1500 apps (from file storage to polling to meeting scheduling etc.) making slack a central point for experiences with users
Microsoft Teams has these similar Slack-like features but is laid out differently.
- As well as Channels, Teams also allows an extra hierarchy level called a “Team”. Each Team has certain members, and Teams can have multiple channels
- As well as the Posts/chat tab, each channel also comes with a files and a notes tab, and you can add other apps as tabs too (although slightly fewer app integrations than Slack)
- In the Posts tab, each message is at the offset already a threaded conversation
- Teams is an access point for other Microsoft 365 Apps: Edit Excel, Planner, Forms etc. without leaving the app.
- Teams is Microsoft’s conference calling software, replacing Skype for business
- Teams for education has extra features to track & grade student assignments
Online meeting software
Calendy now has free integrations with Zoom & Go to meeting. Calendy cuts out the back & forth on where/when to meet. People can book in a meeting through a link and it integrates with your Google & Outlook calendar to prevent double booking and each user sees times in their own timezone. It has advanced preferences e.g. don’t book another meeting with 24 hours from now, allow 30 min buffer time between meetings, block out working hours etc. Microsoft Bookings comes built into Microsoft 365 E1 license which is also free, and also allows customers to book via a bookings page.
HR, promo videos & HR
Clarity Wave (a cloud HR service providing 360 ̊ employee surveys & other tools) is offering 3 months free access.
Vincit California is giving struggling small businesses the opportunity to apply for and receive a customized ecommerce strategy, design & technical advice and free 1 on 1’s with ecommerce developers.
Sparkhouse is creating free promotional videos for small shops to get important information out to their community and how people can currently access their valuable products & services.
Conference calling
Google’s Hangouts meets premium version is free until 30 September, Microsoft Teams calling, as part of Microsoft 365 E1 is free for 6 months. Both have the benefits of being well integrated with the general infrastructure the suite provides so they have more advanced chat & file sharing resources, they also are offering webinar style broadcasting for one was streaming to thousands of subscribers and meeting recordings, Microsoft’s offer goes the furthest with the ability to transcribe the meeting and make it searchable by everyone else after. The free versions of Google Meets & Microsoft Teams now support video meeting calls too.
Citrix WebEx has lifted their usual 40 minute cut off on the free plan, Zoom has done the same for schools and/or certain countries for all. These two-offer advanced functionality like breakout rooms (split participants into multiple smaller sessions then organiser can come in & out), raising a hand (which alerts the host so a muted participant can ask a question easily), plus extra controls by the organiser over participants (over muting/unmuting, showing/hiding video) and several options for how each viewer sees other participants.
All applications offer screen sharing and polling, a whiteboard (where all participants can brainstorm, draw/type etc.) and all besides Meets, have a waiting room (where a host can let participants in one by one) and meeting notes features. Note, we haven’t extensively tested every app to the same level so if one feature is accidentally not mentioned please check.
Advanced screen sharing & recording
TechSmith Video Review, the market leader in screen recording & video editing software is free until 30 June, as is Snagit which allows advanced screenshot editing, perfect for tutorial guides.
Teams, Meets, WebEx & Zoom offer screen sharing including has advanced screen sharing
Full suites
Atlassian at first expanded its free offering including Jira Software (for project management), Confluence (for document collaboration), Jira Service Desk (for customer support tickets) and Jira Core (for workflow), however since then it has started offering its entire Standard Plan suite for free for a full year.
Microsoft 365 E1 license is free for 6 months which includes:
- OneDrive for business with 1TB of cloud storage & SharePoint for file sharing with teams
- Project management tool Planner where you can arrange, assign & change grouping views easily
- Forms for surveys which automatically analyses responses and allows download to Excel
- Stream: An internal YouTube Stream which automatically transcribes videos and meetings making them searchable
- Zoho CRM, a leading player on the market to manage leads and existing customers
- Zoho Books accounting software
- Zoho creator as a database builder
As a final warning, if you sign up now you may be stuck in future so its worth considering before making any purchase!