Productive Tools For The Cloud Era

Technology
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中文版 => GTD Tools

Here is the list of tools that I have been using to improve collaboration and productivity, proved to be effective and cutting edge at lowest possible cost;-)

  • Confluence
    Wiki, Knowledge Management, Documentation, Technical Writing (gollum)

  • JIRA
    Issue, Task and Project Tracker

  • Warning*: For Confluence and JIRA, DO NOT use the pre-packaged HSQLDB unless you are willing to manually run backup to XML whenever an update is made. Migrate to supported databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle or even SQL Server (really!?) if data is important!!!

    • Discourse
      Discussion Forum evolution. Hate Jive? Not so happy with Vanilla Forums, vBulletin, phpBB, PHPWind and Discuz!? Give it a go, it won’t let you down.
    • GitLab
      Self-hosted Git management software. Powered by Ruby on Rails ;-) One of the hottest projects on GitHub. I’ve been using it for hosting private repositories since version 4.0, it’s fantastic and keeps getting better;-) BitBucket / Stash may be an alternative, for public repositories, nothing is better than GitHub.
    • XMPP / IRC
      Instant messaging and chat. Make sure to use OTR – Off-The-Record to encrypt conversations. DO NOT use OTR for Google Talk as it’ll encrypt the conversations and make it NOT searchable in Gmail. It doesn’t make sense because one loses one of Google Talk’s most important feature.
    • Google Apps
      Mail, Calendar, Drive and XMPP (if Google doesn’t kill Talk). Use Zimbra Collaboration Suite open source edition if you don’t trust Google.
    • Dropbox / BitTorrent Sync
      Files and Directories Sync. BitTorrent Sync is secure and born for big files, love it;-)

Comments are warmly welcomed, I will be more than happy to know better tools.