TakeTurns is a turn-based collaboration app where two parties take turns to share, request, or update files and documents. See how TakeTurns helps you and the people and organizations you work with collaborate without the chaos.
Using email for your collaboration is not friendly
When we need to collaborate with professionals outside our own organization or engage in B2B collaborations, we usually rely on email. Email is ubiquitous; we can be confident our counterparties have it and know how to use it (though most of us have had the misfortune of working at one time or another with someone that uses email poorly …).
Email’s pervasiveness does not mean that it’s the best tool for the job. In fact, we know it’s not the best tool for most jobs. We employ a multitude of specialized tools when we do our work internally, such as real time messaging (Slack, Teams), project management (Trello, Monday), co-editing (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), etc. While these are collaboration tools, they’re not great for collaborating with folks outside your organization.
When stakeholders are working together, they usually have distinct but aligned goals. Most of the work on the collaboration is actually done separately; each party takes time to work on their part using their preferred tools. After they’re done, they hand it over to the other party so they can do their job. We also see this internally, especially when working with compliance, regulatory, or internal audit teams (e.g., Medical Affairs-Legal-Regulatory review for pharmaceutical companies, Human Resources, or compliance teams).
We resort to email and attachments to avoid foisting our preferred tools on our counterparties (e.g., I prefer Word and you prefer Google Docs), so we trade email attachments.
Unfortunately, when email is the tool that you and your business associates use to reconcile the separate work you have done, what should be a back and forth structure devolves. Threads diverge, obsolete document versions linger in inboxes to get reintroduced in error, people are added and dropped from threads. Chaos quickly reigns.
The turn-based structure TakeTurns provides will lead your counterparty to thank you for collaborating in TakeTurns instead!
Be a friend and choose a better way to collaborate.
When you engage in B2B collaborations with your clients, partners — or any party —, instead of forcing your preferred tools on them (or adopting theirs), you can both continue to use your preferred tools and reconcile your work seamlessly collaborating in TakeTurns.
The turn-based structure of TakeTurns collaborations keeps everyone on the same page. Everyone always knows whose turn it is to work. Download files to revise them in the tool of your choice, mark files for review, and lock them when revisions are done. Uniquely, a complete version history is maintained for every single file and document, so if any party needs to refer to a previous version it’s a mouse click away.
Parties can take as long as they need on their turn, and deadlines are transparent for everyone throughout. Participants can be added as needed as the work progresses. New participants can view previous turns to get up to speed quickly–try doing that with a forwarded email thread!
If participants need to communicate outside of their turn, they use the built-in chat. This keeps all collaboration related questions and comments in one place, making it easier for everyone to keep abreast of any issues.
When finished, parties download an archive of everything that happened in the collaboration, ensuring that everyone’s records match. Keeping all documents, files, and correspondence about your collaboration in TakeTurns also keeps things secure. Closed collaborations are permanently deleted after a grace period, helping everyone avoid security issues around storing sensitive information in inboxes.
One last thing: TakeTurns is always free for invited participants. Your counterparty doesn't even need to subscribe to work with you in TakeTurns–talk about being collaboration friendly!
For these reasons and more, we think that next time you invite someone to a TakeTurns collaboration, they’ll soon be saying “thank you for using TakeTurns!”
TakeTurns brings structure, security, and transparency to your collaborations. With TakeTurns, you and your parties will know whose turn it is to work, track the full history, and maintain confidentiality. Learn more in our Help Center or follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube. When you’re ready to ‘start being a friend’ and chaos-free collaboration: Try TakeTurns for free.
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