Flowdock

FlowDock is a team collaboration software geared towards the IT industry. It has great integrations to other popular IT based software as a service solutions which extend its core functionality by quite a lot. Allowing it to become an unofficial single sign on of sorts by using it as a portal to third party services which is great. Much more efficient this way. The software itself is very intuitive to learn and get started using really quickly. Should your team use headsets at all during their shift you can still reach out for help by tagging individual team members or the entire team at once and get a prompt reply which is a huge thing especially as everyone is busy during live conversations. And the tagging feature because you can check it from time to time ongoing for team based prompts as more of a background service and not too distracting but you instantly pay attention when it's your individual tag which is great to have the best of both approaches. And if you're out it will always relay an email to you inbox so when you get back to the office, or check on things later there will be a trail to follow and you won't have missed anything at all. I like that your conversations are color coded it seems like a minor thing and it is, but it's surprisingly effective and refreshing to be able to look at the thread and associate it much quicker this way. Just another small way this software differentiates itself in a way I find pretty cool. The chat itself is quite dynamic in the sense you can use a lot of emoticons and embed photos. And even gif's which are always kind of fun. A good idea if I may suggest it is to utilize the groups function as well which can further refine the department team members you're checking in with into a quicker process. Using the groups and the colored associations together are the most effective and organized way to keep tabs on everything in my opinion.

There is not a lot to dislike about this software really it's not reinventing the wheel by any means but it does what it does in the instant messaging very well. And it's not like some other IT solutions you may even integrate don't have this feature even though I am quite confident it is not quite setup this well. But it's the integrations overall in addition to great internal chat which makes this a really cool platform.

I like the pricing model it's very transparent at $3 per user, per month. That's it. So I can appreciate not only the value but the simplicity of the business model. It's a great way to centralize your team in a single account across departments without having to deal with a huge backlog of emails. Or to deal with interruptions on the sales floor during live calls, even though there is a way to reach out for help while everyone is busy without being disruptive so that's the best of both worlds which is awesome. But once again, in my opinion the fact that beyond all what the actual software does very well, the fact you can sync up to Jira and the Atlassian SAAS products, Git, Github, DataDog, DNSCheck.co, Flock, NewRelic, PaperDuty, Pivotal Tracker, Rally, Scout, StatusHero, Subversion, Trello, UserVoice, Zendesk and email is simply outstanding. Using this software as a central portal whether with an official single sign available through their custom plan, or simply unofficially for your own team only with FlowDock at the core it's a smart idea. The productivity and efficiency of everyone will go way up. Highly recommended.