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

sidmitra · on Sept 7, 2009

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.

aaroneous · on Sept 7, 2009

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 · on Sept 8, 2009

thanks! that looks very promising.

gtani · on Sept 7, 2009

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

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

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8bhy6/do_you_te...

chaosprophet · on Sept 7, 2009

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.