How Our Software Team Uses Communifire ... And How You Can Use it Too

If one thinks of blogs as being essentially on-line journals, it may not be evident how they could be used in collaborative ways.

We use the blogs feature for just about anything and everything -- from explaining how future functionality will work, innovating and collecting feedback about new ideas, and posting announcements, timelines, and deadlines.

A nifty feature that we added (and use everyday) is support for the MetaWeblog API ... this allows us to use 3rd party authoring software like ScreenSteps (which I used to create this blog post), Microsoft Word, MarsEdit, etc. to create detailed instructional documents offline and then push them into blog posts for the rest of the team to discuss. Once a blog is posted, it's also pushed into the activity stream where everyone can see it. From there, we use the comments feature to discuss the post, add additional thoughts, etc.

Again, this is something that we use everyday. It keeps all and any bugs extremely organized -- so we can fix them immediately. Everything is trackable, we can set statuses, we can filter on just about any field we choose, and we can see who is fixing which bugs and ones that need to be assigned to developers. Cases is not only for bugs though, you can use it to track just about anything ... bugs, issues, tasks, work orders, support requests, phone calls, etc.

Instead of using Word documents, we use the wiki to create our documents. This allows anyone to collaborate on a document and update it at any time. With our wiki, revision and change management becomes an integral part of how we work -- all revisions are stored, you can see the history of changes with a single click, you can compare any two revisions, and you can always revert back to a prior version. This kind of flexibility gives our team the freedom to be more creative ... they can take more risks because the revision history is there as a safety net. We're also very big on co-authoring, rather than simply passing redlines back and forth.

We store and manage all development related files here. From coding standards, eBooks about programming, and best practices ... to install scripts, test projects, and documentation.

Having all of our files in this one centralized location, rather than in folders on our desktops, gives everyone access to what they need, when they want it ... and it saves a whole lot of back and forth between team members looking for documents.

From here, our developers can download the files ... or they can choose to preview them before downloading.

Here's a shot of what it looks like after you click through to an individual file.  Notice how you can preview the file before downloading it ... you can also track the history of the file.

This is how we get our work done. We use the task manager to keep track of all high level items that we need to complete. Our team meets weekly to go over what has been completed from this list and what needs to be added. Everyone can see at all times what everyone is working on. We drag and drop tasks from list to list to organize them and sort them by priority. Once a task is completed, we simply check them off.

Whenever twe need to find something quick, we use the search functionality.

It searches across all content, files, wikis, blogs, cases etc, making it easy to find anything you want. We can even filter our searches based on the content type.

Communifire Works

Communifire continues to proove to be a great way for us to manage the development of Communifire. 

If we can use it, I'm sure you can too.  Our internal teams are able to easily collaborate with each other to successfully launch new versions of Communifire, solve problems, and communicate daily.

And the best thing about it, is that we don't have to use 3-4 different SaaS applications and tie them all together with API's.  Everything we need to develop great software is already provided in Communifire.

Communifire helps teams inside the organization to get work done.