

Ask HN: what collaboration tools are there for the early phase? - growt

Hi,<p>I'm in the very early phase of a startup and I am looking for a tool to collaborate with my cofounders.<p>I'm the only programmer right now so the focus of the tool is more the exchange of word and image files along with general status updates etc.<p>Things I thought of include:<p>- Google Docs<p>- DropBox file sharing<p>- Installing trac<p>But I'm shure there are lots of solutions for this king of problem (which are a better fit).
So what are you using/suggesting?
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sidmitra
You might wanna try redmine (as an alternative to trac). It has a wiki, news
updates, file uploads, with plugins you can do twitter like status updates,
besides all the project management things. Look at the plugins list on their
site. You can create unlimited projects.

Although it might not be a true collaborative tool in the sense you mean, but
it helps you to do all the other stuff that an early stage startup needs. I've
tried more than a dozen hosted solutions and finally gave up and installed
redmine for all project related needs.

ohh and Dropbox allows you to undo file changes upto 30 days in the past. I
think they do have something called pack-rat, but i don't know it's pricing.

Surprisingly, the microsoft small business options were interesting. With a
plugin you can use your desktop office to update online docs. Which is a
killer feature in my opinion. But i never got around to testing it, since we'd
started on google apps. Their live mesh is similar to dropbox, with 5GB or
more from what i remember. Too bad they don't unify all their solutions and
market it properly.

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aaroneous
One project I'm on uses clockingit.com - it's a free hosted collab tool and
it's also OSS in case you want to migrate from the free hosted version and
host it yourself down the road.

It's pretty straight-forward and easy to get non-techy people to use (which
may or may not be a critical attribute, depending on the makeup of the rest of
your team).

~~~
growt
thanks! that looks very promising.

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gtani
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546444>

<http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=1422>

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8bhy6/do_you_te...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8bhy6/do_you_telecomute_what_is_in_your_toolkit_post/)

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chaosprophet
You might want to check out Mozilla's Bespin. It's very useful if your working
on your startup part-time and your developers are separated by large distances
physically.

