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So you are planning to launch a company intranet or want to replace your fossilized SharePoint portal. There are more than 30 intranet vendors to choose fr om and you are lost. After all, intranets aren't cheap and you don't want to make a mistake. Don’t worry, this intranet evaluation checklist will help narrow down your intranet choices to only the best solutions:   1. Cloud AND self-hosted.   You ONLY want solution that gives you these two choices and most vendors do. Cloud-based intranet services are usually very inexpensive and require no involvement fr om intranet developers who charge a pretty penny. That’s a plus. However, cloud intranets have few customization options and some, like Yammer, are known to have   regular and prolonged outages . You want to have an option to migrate to cloud (if your intranet budget is slashed) or go from cloud to server (if you need customization or for compliance in your industry) any time you want to. Stay away from vendors wh ere...

Slack  is all the rage these days. Twitter is full of excited slackers. VentureBeat says Slack will  change the workplace . TechCrunch  praises  Slack. So does pretty much every other media outlet. HipChat and Flowdock must be losing customers left and right, I imagine. Is there anything out there, that’s better than Slack?   I think so. To me, the best Slack alternative is  Bitrix24 . Not because it’s free for small teams and has affordable unlimited user plans, but because it offers tools that Slack should be offering. These are: 1.       Solo and group videocalls   Chat is fine and dandy, but sometimes you want to talk to a person. WebRTC makes video and audio calls from/to PCs and smartphones fairly easy to integrate into your collaboration platform and this is exactly what Bitrix24 did but Slack did not (yet).   2.      True file management   File sharing is fine. But I expect Dropbox-like fil...

1.       Bitrix24   This is my favorite free online project management software at the moment, way ahead of the competition. The best way to describe Bitrix24 is this. Imagine if Basecamp bought Dropbox, Skype, Salesforce and SharePoint – that’s Bitrix24. Ability to have team chat, videoconferencing, shared calendars and group document management inside your project management platform is brilliant. Gantt charts are a big plus. Also, I like the fact that you have two options with Bitrix24 - cloud based or self hosted project management software that you can host on your server. If you choose the latter option, you can source code to play with as well. The free version gets you 12 users, unlimited projects/tasks/subtasks and 5GB worth of cloud document storage.   2.       Freedcamp   As the name suggests, Freedcamp is a free Basecamp alternative. I am not a big Basecamp fan, I think that their approach to online project management is outdated,...

#5 - Social Document Collaboration Document collaboration tools are among the most widely used in the modern social HR software arsenal. Gone are the days when the only choice you had was ugly (and expensive) SharePoint. Most modern document collaboration solutions work in a cloud, are as easy to use as Dropbox and are free or very inexpensive. The following document collaboration features are available in Bitrix24 Multiuser online document editing Online editor in Bitrix24 Online multiuser document editing is one of the popular ways to collaborate in real time. Not only all changes are instantly visible to all participants of the process, you don’t have to have pricey MS Office installed on your PC in order to work with documents online. Group file sharing and synchronization Bitrix24.Drive Bitrix24 lets you share files with people inside and outside your company in Dropbox-like manner, including password-protected and time-restricted file sharing. Bitrix24.Drive allo...

Tip of the day -  Need company name? Try crowdsourcing https://teamtreehouse.com/ At one of his first jobs after college, Ryan Carson was a software developer who was asked to stay overnight to finish a project. "We ended up working 48 straight hours. I remember catching a few minutes' sleep on the floor," he said. That experience, all too common at startups, gave him a different idea: What if companies could prevent burnout (and reward their employees) by limiting the number of hours they worked? So in 2010, he gave it a shot. Treehouse, located in Portland, Ore., develops online courses in website-building, code writing and mobile apps. The firm, which Carson cofounded, has a second office in Orlando, Fla., and about half of its 75 employees work remotely. While purposefully avoiding San Francisco, Treehouse offers plenty of Silicon-Valley-style perks. The biggest: Every weekend starts on Thursday night. And that doesn't mean Monday through Thursday are 10-hour day...

Tip of the day -  Need company name? Try crowdsourcing   "At Squarespace, we noticed that the things that make a big difference can seem very small," Atkinson said. "For instance, changing the color of a button on our site increased sales. We also found that you can double conversions just by moving some key phrases from the left side to the right." Based on data SumAll collected, here are 10 tips for turning traffic into sales: 1. "My" works better than "your." "'Start my free trial now' will get more clicks than 'Start your free trial now'," Atkinson says. "The word 'my' suggests to people that it's already theirs, so why not claim it?" 2. If your service is free, emphasize that. Adding "100% free" or "Get started for free" will always help boost conversion. When SumAll added "100% free" to its site's headline, sales jumped by 18%. 3. Reassure potential custome...

1. Too social The first generation of enterprise social collaboration tools, as epitomized by Yammer or Jive, were essentially Facebook or Twitter clones built for companies with the idea collaboration revolves around communications. However, it is now exceedingly clear that in many organizations, especially smaller ones, collaboration revolves around specific business tools, typically project management, document management or CRM – not social networking. The second generation of ESNs effectively solves the problem by seamlessly integrating  sales, planning, communication and HR tools  into your company intranet or private social network, giving your employees a reason to use it on a daily basis for their work routine. 2. Top down implementation Vendors and consultants frequently stress how important it is to get support fr om top management and start implementation with them. But contrary to this “common wisdom” this strategy frequently doesn’t work. In order for social coll...