In a previous post, we talked about what we are using to build Sportner; but, you may ask, what makes Sportner (the company) run? In other [ancient] words, what is our back office tool?

Here is a snapshot of the tools we are currently using:

Email & Calendar: Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook

We are using Google Apps (the free offering) for our Email and Calendar. It is very robust and easy to manage (e.g., creating a mailing list with two to five clicks). We are not using the Google Calendar yet, since the Outlook calendar is sufficient for now. I personally use Outlook 2007 with POP3 to read and manage my email.

I also have a Treo 750 connecting with POP3, and everything works like a charm. While Microsoft products might not be very trendy to use nowadays, Microsoft Outlook’s 2007 enhanced category support combined with the new search function is actually pretty amazing. Local search works! And it is fast. I think we can thank Google for showing Microsoft the “desktop search” light.

Files and Content Management: Subversion (later Alfresco)

As mentioned in the previous post, we are using Subversion with TortoiseSVN Windows extension as our repository for all files. We have three repositories, one for business, one for operations, and another one for our product source code and assets.

At some point, we might switch our Business and Operations repositories to Alfresco Content Management which is more appropriate for this type of content collaboration.

Collaborative Editing: Trac (Wiki)

While Wiki is far from perfect, we have not a found better alternative to date. We have implemented some very small but useful Trac macros that make the system very convenient.

For example, we have the macro [[Technorati “myCompetitorKeyWord”]], which includes the Technorati blog stats for a given keyword. I personally think that the real powers behind Wiki are the macros, but they always tend to be thought of last. We have heard that Confluence is a great, easy to use collaborative editing platform, but at this point we do not have the bandwidth (time and financial) to try it out.

Accounting: QuickBooks and Excel

At this point, we keep all receipts in a binder. The only revenue to date is $5.70 from the ads on the right. The plan is to use Quickbookfor basic accounting and Excel for our budget forecasts and reports

IM / Voice Chat: Skype

We are trying to use Skype as much as possible. The voice and video support is very good, the chat support is o.k. (no group chat though). We might use Skype in the future for long distant calls.

Web Conferencing: Adobe Acrobat Connect

As mentioned in one of my Techcrunch comments, we are using Adobe Acrobat Connect. It’s cross platform, easy to use, and cheap $39/Month for unlimited minutes (sessions are limited to 15 participants, which is more than we need). In short, Adobe Connect is a breeze to use.

As you can see, we have opted to have some of these services in-house and others hosted. In general we tend to choose in-house solutions for applications that manage heavy or sensitive content, or would benefit greatly from some sort of customization. For example, there are some good services out there that host Trac and Subversion, but they obviously [have to] charge by size (at least at some point), and do not offer the type of customization you can have with an in-house system (e.g. Trac Macros).

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.