Best practice: Using confluence and other systems like yammer, slack, protonet...

[Daniela Scheiwe]

Hi everyone, we are currently remodeling our internal systems structure and evalute several tools such as slack, yammer, protonet, hipchat, weekdone....We've been using Confluence and JIRA for several years now, but we haven't been able to make it the right toolset for everyone in the company.

My personal vision is to have an entry point for everybody which allows to check what's new / important to me at a glance, without having to open and/or login to several other pages/systems. That should include important tasks, dates, comments regarding my project/teamwork, but also something like internal messageboard ("I brought cake today", "important customer in office today, clean your desk").

Right now everybody puts basically everthing into confluence, noone can find what he's looking for and thus, people start using other tools for their teamwork. We have a huge variety of projects and teams in the company, so I'm aware that it's close to impossible to find that one configuration that works great for everyone.

So my question is: What systems do you use and how? 

[TomC]

You've hit on one of the challenges of IT departments today - with the emergence of BYOD and shadow IT and the ease of any small team implementing and using a bunch of different applications (which they then feel they 'own' and don't want to let go of) it's a new challenge for IT management trying to reduce the sprawl and keep everyone connected. An expression for such chaos in the U.S. is 'like trying to herd cats'. 

The advantage of this approach is we are not 'locked in' to one technology that may or may not work for everyone. For example, SharePoint is a great tool but it is not the best tool for every collaboration need. Thus, the emergence of Confluence and other collaboration tools that have strengths in other areas. But then you have the complaints from some, "We have too many tools and I don't know where to go to find stuff'.  So, there are pros and cons to the appearance and availability of all the new applications.

We haven't gone into evaluations on it, but one approach that could work to keep everyone happy but still surface all the tasks, important dates, comments etc  relevant to each person is the solution offered by Tibbr - see http://www.tibbr.com/ 

Their product claims to be able to hook into all the sites you mentioned and more. They connect to applications like JIRA, Confluence, SharePoint, Salesforce, WebEx, Yammer, Slack, etc.  My understanding is that its user-sensitive so you would get updates on those applications you are connected to, but not get overwhelmed with all kinds of updates from applications your company may use, but you don't.

Would be interested to hear other inputs, but that's a compelling potential solution that might be worth a look (by me too).