Must have collaborative tools for a start up in the tech world

The startup is a challenge in many ways..No experience..no branding..no exposure..no people to maintain your systems..software..more importantly not much money..But still having some core processes is a must and to have those processes it is essential to have the right tools but these tools are costly as they are all proven entities and a must for many companies.

Let me just put down the list

• email - First choice is definitely Microsoft Exchange Server but for most of the start ups it will just be a dream for some years, there are some alternatives but the best being Google Apps. Trust me its really good and i vaguely remember it reading somewhere that google apps themselves run on exchange servers.
• Document, presentation, spreadsheet editor - Yes MS office is the best but it comes at a price and a heavy one so there are some very neat alternate solutions, open office is really good and powerful and has excellent portability to MS office files. There are some online tools like google docs and zoho docs which could cut the queue as well. The google docs and zoho docs come with collaborative editing. How cool is that!!
• International Calls - Suppose you have international clients, this is a major major one. VOIP is the best but voip phones are really costly cisco phones cost around 27k INR. Skype just rocks. You get unlimited calls to anywhere is the world for a monthly price of about 18$. Nothing can beat the price.
• Storage - There is no standard for this, there is sharepoint which has been doing good and some companies use basecamp. I know some of them using salesforce as well. These just provide storage for documents and files with very minimal operations. There are some excellent solutions in injoos teamware and box which give excellent collaborative functions like file locking, assigning the files to people. I have been using Injoos and i also use it to manage my projects thats how powerful the document library in Injoos is.

These are some of the very very essential tools for a company to have.
I write this post with an intention it helps startup get the right tools at the right price and then they can focus right and march in the right direction.
Alright. Cheers