Collaborative tools in project management

The paper presents a brief introduction to the issue of collaborative tools and provides the survey of those that can be used for project proposal development and for project management. Several categories of tools are investigated (collaborative text processors and other authoring tools, dropboxes, whiteboards, shared calendars, teleconferencing, etc.). On the basis of their own experience from project proposal preparation and project management the authors summarize the advantages of these tools over the traditional methods based on sequential processing of various files and documents and present arguments for their use, as they can significantly facilitate the work of the project team, especially in projects with geographically distant partners. Using currently available collaborative tools prepares the users for the work in rapidly developing cloud computing environment. The role and stages of project management office as a supporting structure for project development and managenent is briefly described in the third section of this paper. In the concluding part the authors provide a list of available tools with links and references; many of them belong to the shareware or freeware and can be therefore easily implemented and tested