Ten great iPhone apps for business collaboration

In today's infinitely connected workplace, the iPhone's popularity and usability make it a powerful platform for collaboration. With a few downloads from Apple's App Store, you can be managing projects, updating your team, tracking progress and sharing documents from anywhere you can get a signal.

These 10 apps, all of which are compatible with iOS 3.0 and higher, are among the best out there for working with others. Best of all, most of them leverage the cloud to let you shift seamlessly between your phone and your desktop as you move in and out of the office.

To do any significant work on an iPhone, you have to get around one major limitation: By design, third-party apps can't share data with other apps. That's why, for instance, you can't open e-mail attachments in anything other than the Mail app's built-in viewer.

Fortunately, there are plenty of clever programmers who have designed their apps to use the online storage and sharing services Box.net and Dropbox. As long as you have an account with one of those services, you can access and save files there. Each of these storage services also offers an iPhone app of its own that lets you manage your stored files by, among other things, organizing, sharing and setting permissions for them.

The iPhone app allows you to share individual files or whole folders stored on Box.net, open files using the iPhone's built-in file viewer, and leave comments on files. You can upload photos from the iPhone's Camera Roll; we'll be looking at applications that save other kinds of documents directly to Box.net below. (Of course, you can also add files from your computer by logging into your account at Box.net's Web site.)

As with the Box.net app, the Dropbox iPhone app lets you manage your shared Dropbox files from your phone. You can assign files to team members or other collaborators and see when a file has been viewed or updated so you can keep up with what your teammates are doing.

The app to view files others have shared with you

You can also use the app to view files others have shared with you, but you can't directly edit them or upload files of your own, except photos and videos from the Camera Roll. (Later in this story we'll look at some iPhone apps that let you download, edit and upload files to and from your Dropbox account.) An Events view in the app highlights whenever a file has been added or modified.

Mind maps can be exported and imported in iThoughts' native format, or for team members who don't have iPhones, in any file format used by the most popular mind-mapping applications: Freemind, Novamind, MindManager, XMind, iMindMap or Mindview. Or you can share finished mind maps as PDFs, images or OPML files, which many other apps can import.

One of the most interesting features is iThoughts' built-in file server, which can be accessed over a Wi-Fi network from a computer's browser, allowing you to download and upload files to and from the iPhone directly â€" perhaps a quicker way to share a mind map than having a dozen team members go to Box.net or their shared Dropbox folders. Mind maps can also be e-mailed as attachments.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite: For serious work, you need a serious office suite. Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite lets you view, edit and format word processing documents and spreadsheets and view presentations (editing is coming, according to the publishers)â€"just about all the capabilities you can handle on the iPhone's small screen.

Work-around for e-mail attachments

Quickoffice also offers a work-around for e-mail attachments: Opening an attachment in the iPhone's Mail app will only open it in the default viewer. But if you forward the e-mails to files@quickofficeconnect.com, Quickoffice will add them under the "E-Mail attachments" menu in Quickoffice. Then you can open and edit them in Quickoffice. Like iThoughts, Quickoffice can also be accessed over Wi-Fi using its built-in server; the IP address is listed at the bottom of the app's main page.

With the iPhone app, Soonr users have access to most of the same functions aside from editing documentsâ€"files can be viewed, commented on, e-mailed, even printed via any computer running the Soonr application. The Soonr app is free; the service starts at $8 a month for three users and 10GB of storage (a free account offers 2GB storage and one user, without revision tracking).

Outpost 2: Enormo's Outpost 2 app brings the popular Basecamp project management service to your iPhone with a great interface that makes managing projects easy from the small screen. With complete support for Basecamp's many features, Outpost 2 is about as full a project management tool as you can find on a mobile device.

Outpost 2 also lets you access your Basecamp address book and integrate it with your iPhone contacts. You can use Basecamp's internal messaging system to communicate with team members within the context of your project or send e-mail to any contact. An especially nice feature is the ability to manage several Basecamp accounts, making it easy to contribute to a partner's or client's project while managing your own.

The Huddle iPhone app allows you to access your workspaces, review tasks, view and approve documents and connect with your contacts. The Huddle app is free; Huddle service starts at $8 per month for a single workspace with 1GB storage, then goes up to $40 per month for five workspaces and 250GB storage, and to $8 per user for 500 or more users with unlimited workspaces and storage.

Effective communication is key to collaboration, but it can be challenging when you're out of the office. These apps help arrange, organize and integrate your communications to make working with your team more efficient.

Cisco WebEx Meeting Center: Cisco's WebEx is one of the most popular conferencing services in the business world, offering live screen sharing along with teleconferencing and videoconferencing. The WebEx iPhone app brings a fairly complete teleconferencing experience to the iPhone's screen, including screen sharing and in-conference instant messaging. If you have a WebEx account, you can even initiate meetings directly from your iPhone.

Even better, the iPhone app doesn't require you to make a separate call to phone into the conferenceâ€"once you join a WebEx meeting, you are automatically connected over VoIP. And with the new forward-facing cameras on the iPhone 4, you can even send your image.

The iPhone app is free

The iPhone app is free; a WebEx account costs $49 per month, but you don't need an account to join WebEx meetings via the iPhone, only to host your own.

Yammer: Enterprise microblogging platform Yammer lets businesses set up a private, Twitter-like service, allowing for the open exchange of ideas, links and documents within a select network of people. Like Twitter, Yammer lets users post status updates and receive them in a constant flow, but Yammer users aren't bound by Twitter's 140-character limit. In addition, files of all sorts can be attached directly to status updates, making document sharing and collaboration easy.

Smart Recorder: Smart Recorder from Roe Mobile Development (RMD) is a supercharged version of the iPhone's Voice Notes audio recording app. It lets you tag recordings, bundle them with notes and photos, and share them via Box.net or using Smart Recorder's built-in server. Use the app to record and share voice memos, lectures, conversations and meetings with your team.