Here at DataCraft we have a number of tools that we love to use. I wanted to share some of them with you . If you check them out and like them, then perhaps you can start using them in your organisation. They all provide their products free making it easy to try them out; but they also have paid offerings so you can support the great companies that bring you these tools.
Trello
Trello in a nutshell is an online card tool. If you spend your fortnightly stationary budget on post-it notes, then you should investigate Trello. All those cards, virtually; on your desktop or mobile; shared with your team.
We use Trello to keep track of our development pipeline, from features, bugs and what’s up next in our release, to keeping track of release processes and customer versioning. We do all that on a single unified board for each project and software we produce.
The beauty of Trello however is that you can pretty much use it how you like.
There is a free version, as well as paid upgrades. Being cloud based its available on any platform, with soon to be released off-line capabilities also.
Toggl
Toggl is the essential time keeping app that we use to ensure we capture what we are working on and for how long.
Toggl is another cloud based system that just hums. it is so easy to get started on and use. With some pretty straight forward reporting it meets our needs for timekeeping in our team.
It offers two basic modes, so it can keep track of your time expended on activities, or simple manual mode, so you can enter you actual times against work.
It carries the concepts of projects and clients, so you can mix and match and report on different types of metrics. You also have the ability to create different teams, which separates out your project and client configurations to accommodate larger and more complex structures.
All said and done though, it is the simplicity of Toggl that we like. Its just quick and easy to use.
It also has an iOS app, for when we are out on the go and client sites, making it easy to keep track fo what you’ve been doing.
Simplenote
As its name implies, Simplenote is a basic note taking app. We use it without any bells and whistles. Some times we just need to take notes in meetings. The simplicity means we are up and running quickly and with no fuss.
Simplenote provides cloud storage of your notes, so it replicates seamlessly across devices. It has a native app for Windows and for iOS. That means we have our notes on the go which can be pretty handy.
Simplenote also supports tags, providing an additional level of functionality for classifying your note taking.
If you want a no frills note taking app, we think SImplenote is a great contender.