If you've been using Cloud-based tools for a while, you probably already know about some of the more common tools and apps, such as Dropbox, Evernote, iCloud, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, Skype, Buffer, and Hootsuite. These are all wonderful tools, but there are also a whole host of other tools available.

Here are 10 relatively new tools for productivity, collaboration, and connecting with the world.

This first set of tools deals with personal productivity. They focus on your daily workflow and the tasks in it. Although they are mainly for personal productivity, they also support team work as well.

Hitask is a task management tool for managing your ongoing tasks. Break them up into sub-tasks, schedule them (and integrate them with your calendar), group them into projects, and assign them to other team members. It’s not as powerful as a full project management tool, but it’s ideal for individuals and small teams to track their tasks.

In your regular work, you often work on the same kind of projects over and over again, and these projects usually go through the same stages. For example, if you’re a graphic designer, a project might involve: Client Requirements, Initial Draft, Client Review, Final Draft, Client Approval, and Completion. Trello helps you manage the workflow for these projects.

Trello provides a “board” for everything (think of this like a cork board or whiteboard) and a “card” for each project. As the project progresses, you move the card through stages (just like moving it across the cork board or whiteboard). You can assign cards to different team members as well.

Streak is a basic CRM integrated with Gmail. In concept, it’s similar to Trello, except it lives inside Gmail, which makes it ideal for projects that involve a lot of e-mail communication.

For example, if you’re a salesperson, your dealings with a prospective customer might go through these stages: Enquiry, Contacted, Appointment, Follow Up, Negotiation, Close. In Streak, this is called a “pipeline”, and each individual project (in this case, a prospective customer) is called a “box”. Streak lets you manage the progress of each box through its pipeline. You can create different pipelines for different types of project, set follow-up reminders, and assign projects to other team members.

All of the tools above allow you to involve team members, but generally only in the sense of “handing over work” where necessary. The next set of tools is for better communication between you and your team.

Hipchat is a chatroom application designed to help teams work together in real time. You can create separate chat rooms for different topics, and people can communicate there using text, video, file sharing and screen sharing.

For distributed teams, it becomes the equivalent of chatting in the lunch room or bringing people together in a meeting room. But it’s even useful for in-person teams, where it might be more productive to do a quick online chat than get together for a more formal meeting.

Slack is similar to HipChat, with many of the same features. It has gained a lot of publicity recently, which helps to grow its user base.

Some people even claim Slack is “killing e-mail”, but that’s not exactly right. Instead, Slack and e-mail work well together, because e-mail shouldn't be used for chatting or for urgent messages. This is where Slack takes up the, err, slack, because it’s ideal for those situations. So you can move that type of communication to Slack, and keep e-mail uncluttered so you can use it for longer, non-urgent communication.

This is another chatroom application, designed specifically to help distributed teams feel more connected. Every few minutes, the software takes a snapshot of each team member (using their webcam) and shows it to everybody else. The intent is that everybody can see everybody else, so they feel more connected to them.

Although this might sound a bit creepy, it can work well for some team members, especially those who work alone. It also helps people to know when others are not available, which can be useful to schedule time with them.

This is a simple tool for teams to share what they have achieved each day. At the end of each day, each team member gets an e-mail asking what they achieved for the day. They reply, and the replies are collated and distributed the next morning to the team.

This has obvious benefits for distributed teams, where team members might not have any other way to share their successes. However, it’s also useful for in-person teams, as a way to celebrate small successes every day.

Finally, let’s look at tools that help you connect beyond just your team.

Zapier connects pairs of software packages together, to automate things that would otherwise need to be done manually. For example, if you run webinars with GoToWebinar, and want to add all new subscribers to a MailChimp mailing list, you can create a “zap” to do this automatically.

This is similar to the better-known software IFTTT (“If This Then That”), but is more comprehensive and more business­oriented. For example, whereas IFTTT connects things like Dropbox, Buffer, Evernote, and Google Docs, Zapier connects things like Salesforce, GetResponse, QuickBooks, MailChimp, and OneNote.

LinkedIn now allows you to publish articles directly on LinkedIn, using its “Pulse” feature (previously available only to selected “influencers”).

If you’re a business owner or marketer, you probably already know about this, and you might be using Pulse in addition to your other marketing channels.

If you’re not a business owner or marketer, Pulse is a better platform than blogging, e­-mail newsletters, guest posting on other blogs, and other online marketing channels. That’s because it takes effort to get traction with these other platforms, so it can seem like a waste of time. However, with LinkedIn Pulse, your articles are linked to your LinkedIn profile, so they are automatically helping to build your personal brand – now and in the future.

If you use Google Alerts, you know you can ask Google to automatically send you new Web pages containing certain keywords. This has many uses (for example, keeping track of your name to find out where you’re mentioned online), but it’s not good for everything. In particular, if you try using it for keywords related to your areas of interest, you will probably end up with too many results, and most of them won’t be relevant.

That’s where ContentGems comes in. You tell it your areas of interest, and it serves up relevant articles in those areas. It’s better than a Google Alert because it monitors a smaller set of sources than all of Google. So you'll get a smaller, but more relevant, set of results.

Some of these tools are entirely free, others have a free trial period, and others have a freemium model (free for basic service, paid for upgrade). So I encourage you to try them. Although it might take an hour or two to investigate each, you could get back that investment many times over if it’s the right fit for you.