@hinterwaeldler @mkb @z428
Check out each service, prepare pitch and antipitch, then show to your team?
In my experience noone likes to be forced to use a tool someone else chose

@hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole @z428 Roger roger. Teams I have worked on or with have always used a combination of tools for those tasks rather than a single, unified, collaboration tool.

Some sort of realtime group chat —Slack, IRC, etc—is a huge win, and not just for distributed teams.

Calendar: Google. Done. Document upload: Dropbox or one of its many competitors.

(Continued...)

@mkb @hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole We used #redmine a load, which is awesome as a task tracking tool but pretty much sucks for calendaring and such stuff. Maybe you should check out a combination such as #redmine / #trac (for task tracking, wiki) and #nextcloud (for calendaring, documents, ...). Depends upon how much effort you can / want to spend on that, though.

@mkb @hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole The whole Google tooling is extremely good from a technical and usability point of view but I am somewhat uneasy recommending its use for various reasons. ;)

@z428 @mkb @hinterwaeldler

google--;

@z428 @hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole

I say this as someone whose primary search engine is DuckDuckGo, primary email is Fastmail, and primary document sharing is self-hosted.

Google is frustrating in a bunch of ways but they do some things well. For team calendars I’m not aware of anything that comes close to GCal.

But, all these things are subjective.

@mkb @hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole I'm on the same boat, unfortunately in everything you said: Mostly using self-hosted stuff personally, still focussing on doing the same in enterprise environment as well, so far I never managed to build a calendar anywhere near Google Calendar using any of the open tools I tried.

@mkb @z428 @hinterwaeldler
> For team calendars I’m not aware of anything that comes close to GCal.

you're right :(

Radicale isn't enterprise grade. NextCloud Calendar sucks.
Microsoft Exchange is cumbersome.

@mkb @z428 @upshotknothole You're spot on, I'd refer FLOSS software. But I see that this is not doable sometimes. If the tools you're using are not easy enough to understand / implement / maintain, people won't use it.

And I also love shared google calendars. 😃

@mkb @hinterwaeldler @z428
#rocketchat and #mattermost are FOSS Slack-like chat clients which cen be self-hosted.

And never underestimate #XMPP!

@upshotknothole @mkb @z428 Wow, RocketChat looks extremely nice! Thanks!

@hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole @z428 Oh cool. I’ve been curious about the OSS Slack alternatives.

@hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole @z428

With a wiki, most orgs are wooed by features and lose track of the one attribute that really matters: low friction for editing pages. A few folks like @emmie have legit requirements beyond that but for living documentation and “here’s what I am doing,” bells and whistles are just friction.

Low friction means different things for different teams: markdown vs WYSIWYG, etc. There are good, googleable comparison charts.

@mkb @hinterwaeldler @z428 @emmie

IMHO wikis suck

I love the concept. I love some maintained online-wikis.
Yet I have never seen it being used low-friction. pain > gain IRL.

@hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole @z428

The choice of task tracker is partly dependent on the work itself. Coding teams will want something different from writers.

Pivotal Tracker is fabulous but expects a particular style of work. Many people love Trello. Jira is either a godsend or evil incarnate, depending on who you ask. (It’s pure evil.)

@mkb @hinterwaeldler @z428 jira is like 99 % evil except when you're at the top and can assign work to people

"Here I fucked it up for you! Hooray for management!"

@hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole @z428

Tackle one problem area at a time, adopt a tool, and settle in before you progress to the next.

The the right process make a bigger difference than tools. The practice of a daily standup is great when done well. Most orgs do it poorly, of course, but that’s avoidable with a little research and coaching.

Get people in the habit of communicating often and clearly. Set a tone of collaboration and mutual support.

@mkb @hinterwaeldler @upshotknothole Yes that's what I would suggest as well. Check what's your *biggest* issue and try to fix this first. As for Jira: This is *immensely* powerful a tool but you should expect pain and a steep learning curve to get it to work right.

@Maltimore my experience is similar. Try to avoid overhead. When you have a virtual projectteam a tool may make sense otherwise some short (15 min) 'StandUps' where the actual actions/tasks from the teammembers are highlighted and some kind of formal weekly status notes may do the job. (Beside calendar, a good structured shared fileshare and mail).
As project lead/manager a continues personal project diary in paper helps also. @hinterwaeldler

@vilbi @Maltimore Of course, too much overhead would be the wrong path. I'm aware of that. 😃

@sheogorath Of course, email & personal meetings are the way we work right now. I feel like we would get more focused if we wrote down what we're working on, you know.

@turion Nope, it's research / science. But thanks!