Our Intranet Solution: Combining Cloud-based Collaboration Tools

Source: company websites

In large, monolithic business environments, a software license can become make-or-break in terms of productivity.Just managing such licenses (how many clients they can be installed on, what versions they cover, the serial number, etc.) can actually become someone’s full-time job - not even taking into account the technical components of software management. 




Thankfully a cash-strapped startup these days does not have to take this kind of hit on productivity; almost every business need is served in the market by one or more online tools.

Need group chat and collaboration? Google Hangout. Office productivity suite? Google Apps. Storage? SkyDrive, Google Drive or iCloud. Large file transfers? Box. Code repository? Github. Accounting? Freshbooks. Legal matters? Lawpivot. Logo design? 99design. This is just a small selection of the many online solutions we implemented in our every day working life (Which Online Tools should every start up use? Check out our blog). The possibilites are seemingly endless, but selected tools combined in the right way are enough to get a minimal startup off the ground.

Of course, online applications are subject to outages, security risks, and sometimes vendor lock-in. However, most have scaled very well as they have taken on larger volumes of clients and have gone a long way to maintain availability SLAs that approach 100%.

One other potential problem with online applications is that they are sort of created in a vacuum – they are not inherently designed to play nice with each other or be easy to use in conjunction. While the old business intranet was loaded up with local solutions that IT professionals could customize and patch with scripts and in-house apps, bringing web applications together on an intranet is a fairly untested path.

We went out on the search for an intranet that will consolidate all of our tools and can:

• Search over all services: cue, google site search, elastic search
• Bookmarks/site of all services
• Activity stream of all updates: hipchat, yammer etc.
• Calendar events, birthdays..

Thanks to the comments we received we identified three powerful cloud services for our start up. Here's a synopsis of their pros and cons:

Meldium: Logging in and out of the various services needed to keep a business flowing with purely online applications can be a challenge. That’s where Meldium comes in:

Pros:

• Access management (account sharing without sharing username and password with the team)
• 500+ world class apps are supported, wide variety
• Secure via two factor authentication (!)

Cons

• Doesn’t provide member roles 
• Mobile version not yet available 
• Doesn’t provide advanced search for members

Busyflow: brings cloud-based productivity apps onto a single screen - for collaboration and synchronization purposes.

Pros:

• Invite colleagues to a certain workspace
• Superior dashboard for all feeds
• Distinguish between feed (read) and discussion (write)

Cons:

• Adding tasks isn't possible as a shared option (!)
• Doesn't connect Evernote
• Paid plan for more than 3 members per workspace - 5$ /month

Hojoki: Great collaboration home base with an integration of over 30 apps to manage productivity streams across platforms

Pros:

• Invite colleagues to a certain workspace
• Create / assign tasks
• Wide range of apps supported via API

Cons:

• Tasks only have 2 progress-options (open & done) and cannot be assigned to a group
• Doesn’t provide a superior feed for all workspaces
• Paid plan for more than 5 members per workspace - 5$ /month

We are now working with Meldium and Hojoki in our daily collaboration and see the added benefit of this combination to our online workspace! Do you have any further suggestions of online intranet solutions? Do you have questions about our experience with Hojoki or Meldium? We would love to hear from you in our comments below!

--

Join our first "Global Crowd Network" for Lean Startup funding! Connect with facebook on www.ufostart.com and calculate your Startup Value. Interested in how you can leverage the power of the crowd for your startup? Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter!