Top Collaboration and Communication Tools for 2025

The New Year is right around the corner, which makes now the perfect time to look ahead to the software and business tools that could take your business to the next level in 2025.  

Getting your team to work together more collaboratively in the new year could be the key to unlocking greater efficiency and creativity. Plus, help you deliver better results. Whatever industry you are in, these communication and collaboration tools can transform your organisation and help you win more business in the upcoming year. 

Chat and Calling tools 

Teams Phone 

Many businesses already turn to Microsoft Teams for their internal communication and collaboration. For your in-house communications, it does just about everything you need. But did you know Teams also has an add-on that replaces your existing phone service? Teams Phone enables you and your colleagues to make and receive internal or external calls, set up call management features, and turn any of your devices into a landline so you can talk to customers from wherever you are. 

Microsoft Places 

You can add yet more functionality to Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Places. This tool can recommend the best days to be in the office based on your calendar as well as your coworker’s planned attendance in the office. It can also inform room bookings to ensure you always have a space for collaboration and offers a seat and room booking map from within your Outlook or Teams experience.  

Teams Rooms 

Teams also has add-ons to revolutionise the way businesses hold meetings in distributed businesses, such as Teams Rooms. With intelligent speakers and cameras that track active speakers and enhance video and audio quality, Interactive Whiteboarding to enable participants to brainstorm and collaborate visually in real-time. Wireless content sharing and document co-editing enable further collaboration, Teams Rooms re-images meetings for hybrid work environments.  

How Grey Matter uses Microsoft Teams 

We use many of the Microsoft Teams features discussed above to improve the way we communicate and collaborate. As a hybrid business, add-ons such as Teams Rooms and Teams Phone have enabled our employees to work from wherever they are, without skipping a beat. Whether on-premises or at home, our employees can collaborate with one-another as though they’re in the same room and make or take calls from their laptops or mobile phones. To hear our experiences of using these tools and learn how they can transform your business, get in touch. 

Team collaboration tools 

MindManager 

To enhance your team meetings and create a space for brainstorming ideas and managing projects collaboratively, MindManager is the ideal tool. It offers mind mapping capabilities to help to better organise the thoughts and ideas of your team, as well as flowcharts and diagrams that can help to visualise processes and workflows. 

Your whole team can contribute to the conversation by sharing your maps to enable real-time collaboration. This is easier still with MindManager’s integrations with Microsoft 365 and Jira, bringing enhanced collaboration to the tools you use every day. 

Adobe Acrobat 

Or for collaborating on PDFs, look no further than Adobe Acrobat. You can annotate PDF documents and share in real-time, making it possible for multiple people to edit, leave comments, mark-up and review a single PDF document at the same time. To avoid confusion, Acrobat helps you to keep track of different versions of documents, so you can review previous versions and undo changes if necessary. 

You can also ensure that your documents don’t leave your team by setting a password or certificate to make it more secure and manage permissions so that only authorised users can make changes to documents. 

Collaborative coding and development 

For all your development needs in 2025, here are the tools for you. 

Azure AI Foundry 

First up is Azure AI Foundry, an AI development platform, designed to build, customise and manage AI solutions. It has various features that set out to make developers able to work more collaboratively, including cybersecurity features to make your team collaboration more secure. Or there are Hubs and the Azure AI Foundry management centre, which provide central locations to manage and organise AI projects and govern computing resources across multiple projects and playgrounds. 

Azure DevOps 

There are various other tools that enable dev teams to work more collaboratively. One example is Azure DevOps, which provides a shared space for dev teams to collaborate, integrating tools that manage the whole development lifecycle. It has features to enable planning meetings, source control, testing and CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery). It’s a single platform for all the tools you need. 

JetBrains Code with Me  

JetBrains also enables more collaborative development with Code With Me. This service enables developers to share their latest project with team members and work on it together, in real time. This is the ideal tool for investigating issues as a team, coding and debugging together, or training new starters by showing them around the code you’re working on.  

GitHub 

Alternatively, developers can use GitHub to enhance their collaboration. With features like version control to work on the same project simultaneously, GitHub Codespaces for collaborative coding and GitHub Actions for CI/CD, GitHub has everything a dev team could ask for to work more collaboratively.  

For more information on the hottest developer tools you need to know about, we’ve put together a blog on the top developer tools for 2025.  

Are you ready to enhance your collaboration? 

If you’re looking to connect your team in 2025, we have the solutions for you. While we’ve discussed a handful of the solutions that can take your communication and collaboration to the next level in 2025, there are many more that could revolutionise the way your team works. Fill out the form below and get in touch with our team to discuss your specific needs.