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Comment by antjanus | Hacker News Reader

Sure! A few of them:

1. Dropbox Paper for easy note-sharing. We've got a ton of docs we share, update, and constantly reference to

2. Appear.in - https://appear.in/ - probably the best team conference software we've used. We compared it to Slack, Skype, Hangouts (which is horrible), and a few others. Appear.in always won out, plus we can use it with contractors/clients without the need of an account. Works really well from the phone, too.

3. Org Mode - a recent addition, we've been using org mode to plan out dev sprints and story out features before putting them into PM software

4. Slack - self-explanatory

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I initially loved Dropbox Paper.

However, being so easy to manipulate it has become a place of braindumping. I begged my boss to separate his personal notes vs. company documents. It has gone out of hand. Tons of unattended documents that people have forgotten about.

Creating new documents and editing them has become so cheap (congrats to paper devs for managing that) that its backfiring in our case.

As for team conferencing, we used many many different tools. Recently we started using zoom.us and the quality is amazing. Much higher framerate and resolution with a better CPU usage.

My company uses hangouts almost exclusively, but I have had a chance to work with a 3rd party that uses zoom and zoom is amazing. It just works. Most conferencing software I rate on a numberline of hate. Zoom doesn't even exist on that dimension for me.

I could never get hangouts to work properly across platforms/devices. Once I had to spend 15-20 minutes with an interview candidate setting it up (it messed up on both sides) at which point, I refused to do hangouts with anyone.

Agreed. I wish my company used zoom.us. It is so painless.

We're in the process of trying to get a trial for Zoom, as we initially bought in heavily on Google Hangouts and it's proving to be a terrible UX. I know how to use it, and I've shown everyone how to setup meetings, add rooms, etc... several times now, but it never sticks.

I say "trying" to get a trial, as two people from our company have contacted Zoom multiple times, and while the initial contact is great, we just cannot get any followups. It's very frustrating, especially considering that all my dealings with Promevo have been absolutely outstanding.

Another huge +1 to https://appear.in. They built an incredibly well designed tool, that does one thing, perfectly, every time.

Exactly!

Tangential question, any tips about using orgmode with a team? Right now I use it for notes at meetings (pretty much all meetings) and translating those notes into tasks with dates etc, but I haven't been able to figure out a good way to get a team to use it...

We don't use it for async collaboration. So we have one "driver" who takes the notes and when we're done and ready to move to the PM, one of us transfers the tasks. One of our devs pretty much started this trend.

Here's what it usually looks like:

* Project name

* * Large Project section [manually added point value]

* * * task name [pt value]

- further notes on task (really shouldn't be there, task should be very self-explanatory and atomic)

* Estimate

* * Pt value total for the project and estimation math.

Jitsi meet[1] (which you can self-host if you want) is a lot like appear.in

[1]: https://meet.jit.si/

We used this for awhile and it is OK (will get the job done) but we had much better audio/video quality with commerical solutions like GoToMeeting, WebEx and Jabber.

Would recommend if you are on a budget and need a self-hosted solution though.

How is Dropbox Paper better than Google Docs?

It forces you to focus on content, not layout, and it has a great editing & commenting experience. Basically it's Google docs with fewer features, and then the remainder very well done. This makes it a joy to use.

Imagine if you could format Google Docs using markdown, including code fences with syntax highlighting built right in.

Paper does that.

I’ve been using Paper for months and it feels old and stodgy now when I open a Google Docs.

Even comparing Google Docs against itself, it fails. Slow to launch, poor search, document corruption. The only good quality is being able to plus someone a task.

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