Top 15 Tools for Telecommuting Tech Teams

Until quantum physicists finally achieve teleportation, more and more companies are embracing telecommuting as a great option for breaking the archaic office walls.

Whether you're making a case on why you should be able to work remotely, or if you're simply looking for tools to better collaborate, look no further.

Read: How Successful Tech Teams Work Remotely 

We spoke with Brian Manning, cofounder of Centric Digital, named one of Inc 500's Fastest Growing Companies about managing teams spread across the globe. We also spoke with Court Demone, design and marketing lead at both SearchTempest.com and AutoTempest.com as well as Preet Anand, CEO of tech company Blue Light about their favorite apps for working from home.

Here are the top tools they simply can't live without, in no particular order:

1. Google Hangouts

   All of the companies we spoke with use Google Hangouts regularly to have virtual face-to-face meetings. 

2. Pivotal Tracker

   This is an Agile development task manager, where Demone’s team stores all of the things they’re going to be doing, whether it’s code based or marketing based.

3. Bit Bucket

   Demone uses this as their Git depositary. All of their code and server information is stored here. It also offers wikis that are incredibly useful as well.

4. Google Docs

   Great for marketing and advertising efforts.

5. Box

   Document management.

6. Google Voice

   Great for international calls.

7. Join.me

   Some prefer this screen-sharing application.

8. Harvest

   Tracking time and expenses.

9. Smartsheet 

   Project planning tool.

10. Bamboo HR

    Centric Digital's whole human resource info system is managed using this.

11. GitHub

    For coding versioning

12. Slack

    Anand's team prefers this for team chatting. He says it's awesome. 

13. Skype

    Team meetings, of course. An alternative to Hangouts. 

14. Asana

    Task management app preferred by Anand's team at BlueLight. 

15. JIRA

    Bug tracking, Agile project planning used by Centric Digital.