Collaboration

To keep up with tasks and discussions, we use the new Active Collab. We started using it while it was still in the early development stages; so we were the first users and the harshest critics. Now everything’s running smooth and we keep track of all the discussions, to-do tasks, bugs, and notes here.

Slack lets us instant message each other, company-wide, and chat in channels divided by spheres of interest like: #support, #dev-team, #builds, #feather, #documentation, #design-team, and #mobile. We also have a #chitchat and #random channel for banter and funny memes.

Support

Our main support tool is SupportYard — a help desk software. When we receive a support question, we can see the message inside SupportYard and assign it to someone on the support team. We also use it for lead follow-up to get in touch and offer assistance to people who signed up for a free Active Collab trial.

LiveChat is how we communicate with people who are on our website and who want to ask us a question. Skype is for one-on-one calls.

For holding webinars we use GoToMeeting. That way we can show clients how to use Active Collab, guide them through functionality, and let them ask us questions.

We use TeamViewer for troubleshooting. That way we can access remote computer over the web and solve the problem directly. The client grants us access and sees what we are doing on their screen. It’s more efficient than typing questions and suggesting solutions over the chat, email, or Skype.

For taking screenshots, we use Skitch. It lets us annotate screenshots, crop them, and blur certain parts. It integrates with Evernote.

Because we type a lot, often same phrases over and over — we use Text Expander (for Mac, $34.95). It lets you create shortcuts or snippets with a trigger that expands to whole words. For example, you can type @sp and it will expand to support@activecollab.com. There is also a free Chrome extension, Auto Text Expander, that works in the browser.

Design

For working with vectors and making illustrations, Affinity Designer (for Mac, $49.99) is a good investment. It’s similar to Illustrator, only not as expensive. A free alternative is Inkscape — it may not have a great UI, but it gets the job done fine once you learn it.

For quick layouts and UI/UX design, we use Sketch (for Mac, $99). It lets you create quick mockups and see what works visually.

Photoscape is an efficient and fun photo editing tool. It lets you do quick edits, add special effects, combine images, make collages, batch edits, and more. For more complex image editing, GIMP is a great free replacement to Photoshop.

Writing

Sublime Text is a joy to write in. It’s fast, has plenty of plugins, and lets you be crazy efficient. Combined with knowledge of Regular Expressions, snippets & macros, and the Emmet plugin — you’ll be an efficiency juggernaut. Also be sure to check out the distraction-free mode and see why it got its name.

During collaborative writing and proofreading, we use Google Docs as you can share the documents, let people make edits which you can approve or reject. Documents that are used by more than two people are put it in Active Collab notes and further edited, while keeping track of the changes.

Grammarly is an extension and an app that checks for spelling errors anywhere in the browser. It also spots some grammatical errors and suggests solutions.

Reading

For keeping up with news and blogs, Feedly is a cool RSS feed manager. You tell it what blogs and websites to subscribe to, put them under categories, and get updates when new posts are published. Later, you see what’s new, click on interesting posts, and mark others as read.

If you find a good text that you don’t have the time to read at the moment, you can use Pocket. You just press the browser extension button and it will save the article on your phone that you can read later during your commute, even offline.

To save quick notes you can use Keep (lightweight) or Evernote (more features). It’s also nice that you can save passages from an article in Pocket to notes and save them from oblivion.

Marketing

We wrote how we use Buffer for social media management. It helps us share interesting web resources with our followers and keep a presence on social networks.

Google Analytics is used for all sorts of insights like which blog articles were most read, how many visitors we receive, bounce rates and time spent on certain parts of the website.

For the newsletter, we have used a self-hosted Active Campaign that we bought a long time ago, coupled with Litmus to test if emails work in different clients. But, we decided to try out MailChimp and put its features to a good use — in other words: no more hand coding each newsletter and hoping it works.

DevOps

For many day-to-day SysAdmin jobs, we use custom Bash scripts that take care of jobs like registry cleaning, maintenance scheduling, updating user accounts, routine audits, image resizing, monitoring domain name expiration, log scanning, environment setup and more.

Gulp is a task automation tool we use for our website. It lets us define what tasks to perform and when. It frees us from repetitious tasks like: Sass preprocessing, minification, concatenation, includes, live reloads, etc.

We use GitLab to collaborate on code and track changes, and SourceTree as our Git client. Our branching model is Github Flow which proved as a successful strategy — it’s a very simple workflow as you don’t have to deal with a lot of branches, as we used to with GitFlow in the past.

For continuous integration, we use Jenkins. It lets us test and build Active Collab updates with a click of a button. After we have pushed commits to our development repository, Jenkins tests the code against test cases we wrote prior. After they are tested, we get an email if it fails. If it passes, it builds the new version of Active Collab and deploys it to our production servers.

To make sure we all develop in the same environment as the production’s, we use Vagrant. It starts a virtual machine on our Macs, runs Linux Debian behind the scene, and makes our development tools behave as if they were working in Linux. This way we all work on the “same” machine, don’t run in “It works on my computer” problem, and transition to production is smooth. Jenkins starts Vagrant before performing unit tests.

Since we have a SaaS product, we need to have some tool to mass manage all the servers. We use Puppet, but for new projects we are switching to Ansible. They let us achieve consistency among all our servers. If something needs to be changed, we don’t need to go to each server individually — we can just tell our automation tool what changes to make and they are executed on all machines we specify.