We just held our big event and it was pretty darned successful. There were about eight people who were involved in running it. We needed to stay in touch with each other and share some spreadsheets on stuff to do, schedule, money, and so forth.

I refuse to use farcebook due to their persistent security and privacy problems. A couple other key people on the team are also farcebook refuseniks.

My benevolent employer blocks access to google docs and google drive, as well as some other file sharing sites.

The guy in charge of the event decided to use slack. I'd never heard of slack although I have read that it's one of the largest companies in San Francisco. I gotta say, I'm not very impressed. It allows you to send messages to one or a group of people and post documents. Whoop-de-doo. I've seen better messaging services (and certainly better user interface) on dating sites. And again, my benevolent employer blocks access to it from our work computers.

I tried to use it on my iPhone. From any mobile device, slack just blows a raspberry at you and says you have to use the app. The app crashed my personal iPhone. My benevolent employer won't let us install apps on our work phones. I hardly ever use my home computer. So, the only way I could actually get into slack was on my iPad and only by forcing it use the desktop site.

I missed a lot of communications because the feature to send you an e-mail when you have a new message apparently only works intermittently. And one of the other organizers was similarly frustrated and just reverted to keeping stuff on google docs.

Well, our festival was a success, despite all this. We had about 160 people show up and a good time was had by all. And the silly ties were a big hit.

But as we are starting to plan next year's event, we need to find a better platform. I'm good with just e-mail -- we can manage a couple of DLs for the various planning functions. Does anyone know of another collaboration platform that actually works and does NOT require you to download their stoopid app?

Personally, I have good experiences with Slack when it comes to collaborating with teams, but I acknowledge that Slack is built for teams in which most (if not all) team members are work for the same company/organization.

I also like Google Apps but yes, that practically requires every one who wish to collaborate to have a Google login, and corporate IT types do block many things on the WWW.

Not that I use much but if most of your group use Microsoft Office (and their corporate IT types are more Microsoft friendly), you may be able to collaborate through Microsoft OneDrive:
https://support.office.com/en-...6f-a8c9-a493de18258b
https://support.office.com/en-...60-9b6f-9aa1cf01b403
But that too would require every one to have an Office365 login.

It comes down to the lowest common denominator for the majority of the group. Worst case is you stay with plain text files shared over e-mail.

For IM we use trillium.
Some of our departments uses mattermost which I think has to be installed on corporate servers.
Parent company uses Skype for business.
Trade association uses Higher Logic--doesn't have collab editing just file libraries-- but used to use Hubspot.
Use Slack for some projects with external companies.
Use OneNote and Evernote for my personal notes, but haven't shared them much.
Sometimes use google docs for collab editing
Use google drive for sharing family files.
Have also used basecamp for individual projects with multiple organizations.

Glad the event was a success.

Slack is OK. I prefer Teams. Skype is not awful either.

We use Jira. Takes some setting up, but works well once you've done so.

Nina’s mention of JIRA reminded me of Confluence by the same company. I like JIRA for task and issue tracking, Confluence is good for collaborative editing of simple documents. Confluence works as a wiki platform.

If the work is spreadsheet centric (documentation and task planing can all be done in spreadsheet form), then Smartaheet may also work. It’s like a stunted cross of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project, can do a bit a of either, not as powerful as either, but works entirely over the web as a service.

Since we are all “forum” people, perhaps a forum platform like this can be used to collaborate. May be set up a “private” (requiring login to access) “forum” and just go from there?

My kids use Slack at work and like it.

I just got invited to my first Slack group (for designers in my wholesaler’s group, so I feel like a real un-grownup now. Woot!

Yep, Confluence as well. It slipped my mind since most of the stuff I do involves tasks and issue tracking. Confluence has been useful for document sharing/collaboration... certainly much better than god-awful Google documents.

And then there is Microsoft SharePoint, whose point I never get. I have yet to come across any SharePoint implementation that I actually like to use. But Microsoft shops’ sysadmins seem to like it.

Yep. Box and Sharepoint are just complicated shared directories that serve primarily to prevent you from doing what you want. Jira is nice for issue tracking, but like so many other of its ilk it is so flexible that it becomes a bit cumbersome.

We mentioned Slack earlier ... the company just started publicly trading its stocks today. Heck of a first day trading price pop, now the company is valued at over 20 Billion USD!