Looking for an easy way to impress your boss? Here’s an idea to help you do just that. You won’t even have to call your tech guy for help, just a little ingenuity. Most people in this country work for small businesses, and those companies don’t tend to have the budget, in-house expertise, or even the inclination to invest in much technology. But here’s one place where you can start, which will save both time and money for your company. Everybody has files, even tiny companies. According to FactCheck.org, 80% of all companies have less than 10 people on the payroll. This makes the solution I want to discuss with you ideal for you, or for someone you know. Say you work for a law firm, a plumbing contractor, or a doctor’s office that fits this description. Go ahead and admit that you probably have some files stored in a shared folder. Yeah, I knew it. More than once, you probably wasted time looking through file names that might contain the information you need. Wouldn’t it be easier to do a search, like a Google search, in order to find what you’re looking for? Enter Confluence!
Confluence Collaboration Tool
It’s a low-cost, easy-to-use product that many of us in the software industry use to share information with each other, to store files, to create charts, and much more. You can create keywords so that you can easily search them later. For your team of 10 or less, it will cost a measly $10 a month for ALL of you to leverage this powerful tool. If you’re not too scared of the words, “host it yourself,” it will cost you $10 to buy it outright. The $10 a month option means that all the stuff you put in Confluence will reside “in the cloud,” on their servers. Anytime Atlassian, the company that created Confluence, updates the product, you won’t have to lift a finger. It will be done for you transparently. If you host it yourself on your own set of computers, then you will have to decide if when to upgrade to the newer versions.
But wait, there’s more!
Confuence Team Calendar
You all work on a schedule, right? Once in a while, you would like to take vacations, and not have to send 10 reminder emails? The Team Calendar is a $10 add-on that can be used by the same 10 people to track everything. It’s a thing of beauty. If all these goodies don’t cause your boss to tell you, “Go for it,” it’s time to pull on their heartstrings. As a further selling point, all the proceeds from the products that Atlassian sells at the $10 price point go to charity. It’s a win-win for everyone around.