Ask Pipedot: small office collaboration/messaging
Here's the situation: you've got a small office of 8-20 employees who work in a consulting business and whose main products/deliverables are reports, spreadsheets, occasional CAD drawings, Gantt charts, project plans, and the like. Not only do they produce those things, they receive reports for which they produce comments/observations. Much of what they produce is collaborative or iterative (ie, not necessarily 'live editing' of spreadsheets, but several people must all contribute to a doc over the space of a week or so). To do so, they need efficient means of communication, discussion, versioning, etc.
Needs: document repository, shared editing of many types of documents, a messaging system for internal office communication, "sharing" system that permits clients to upload or download large files, a managed-content "front page" web site, an internal intranet, shared calendars, contacts lists, some sort of system to produce and maintain office policies and procedures, and otherwise manage internal communications and office admin. Some considerations for discussion, so I'm intentionally not specifying: (1) ideally, systems are usable by different OSes. Obviously there are going to be problems ensuring total OS independence. (2) ideally, the system doesn't require full-time online presence. Should a consultant wind up in a basement office with no internet, he won't be totally lost (again, not perfect). Note: no obligation for Free/Open Source software, although they are preferred. The goal here is an office that communicates and collaborates efficiently.
Ten years ago, you'd be sitting in a cube farm, using Microsoft Office and a shared drive and emailing documents back and forth. Later they'd have added Sharepoint. These days, there's been a ton of innovation in these areas, and there's consensus that collaboration-by-email is not fun. And there are lots of new approaches to these age-old problems.
So, how would you do it?
Needs: document repository, shared editing of many types of documents, a messaging system for internal office communication, "sharing" system that permits clients to upload or download large files, a managed-content "front page" web site, an internal intranet, shared calendars, contacts lists, some sort of system to produce and maintain office policies and procedures, and otherwise manage internal communications and office admin. Some considerations for discussion, so I'm intentionally not specifying: (1) ideally, systems are usable by different OSes. Obviously there are going to be problems ensuring total OS independence. (2) ideally, the system doesn't require full-time online presence. Should a consultant wind up in a basement office with no internet, he won't be totally lost (again, not perfect). Note: no obligation for Free/Open Source software, although they are preferred. The goal here is an office that communicates and collaborates efficiently.
Ten years ago, you'd be sitting in a cube farm, using Microsoft Office and a shared drive and emailing documents back and forth. Later they'd have added Sharepoint. These days, there's been a ton of innovation in these areas, and there's consensus that collaboration-by-email is not fun. And there are lots of new approaches to these age-old problems.
So, how would you do it?
Just discovered http://openkm.org, which is a doc repository that allows for check-in/out, team editing, and such. There used to be a similar system called o3spaces (Dutch), but they turned their attention to some kind of new Android/iOS app that does team writing, and they've let the collaboration system lapse, which is too bad - it was based on Tomcat and ran well. There are probably a few others out there. O3spaces had neat plugins for OpenOffice and MS Word so you could check out, edit, and then check back in your docs. That was awesome, but since the OO.o-LibreOffice split I haven't seen anyone updating their plugins and this model seems to be falling out of favor in lieu of constant-connection online editing, which is good if you're all plugged into fat connections but bad news otherwise.
On the messaging side, the ycombinator folks are crazy about something called http://www.slack.com which seems like running your business on twitter (internal communications) with links to Trello, Github, others. Seems pretty neat, but the messages don't get organized in a tree, so you've kind of got a running feed, which annoys me. I'd almost prefer an internal NTTP site (no peering, sharing) instead of corporate email, which sucks.