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Ask HN: What's your early stage productivity stack?

2 points by shoto_io ↗ HN
Hey there, we are a slowly growing startup and now are thinking about how to bring our currently fragmented productivity (personal gmail etc.) setup to the next level.

Some of my thinking revolves around:

- G Suite is great for docs, but I don't want to trust Google with our email and calendars

- Dropbox is great, but has no calender/mail functionality

- MS is ok, but G Docs is so much better for collaborating

What do you guys use? Is there any best practice we could follow?

8 comments

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___luigi
> but G Docs is so much better for collaborating

Did you try MS Teams + Office 365?. I can share documents with my colleagues and collaborate on the same document.

warrenm
When Teams first came out, I was among the early decriers (Slack and Zoom were SOOOoooooo much better for chat and video-conferencing/screen-sharing it wasn't funny)

(Kinda like when Slack came out, it was so much worse than HipChat, it wasn't funny)

Then the integrations started popping-up (or being publicized? not sure which is the more correct term) for everything MS-related (Word, Calendar, Excel, PowerBI, Sharepoint...)

The chat functionality of Teams still leaves some to be desired (especially the ultrajanky and inconsistent notification feature) - but the videoconferencing, screensharing, and O365 integrations are fantastic

warrenm
O365 is pretty darn good ... I use both, and I'd say it's better than G-Suite for work-related stuff

Leaving aside the ubiquitous "interoperability" argument, MS' stuff just feels worlds more polished

The best office suite (sans email and calendar hosting), in my experience so far, is from Apple (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) - their collaboration through iCloud has the been the most seamless across device types in their respective dedicated apps

warrenm
(This presumes you're running iOS/macOS/iPadOS, of course, as your business device platform(s) of choice)
shoto_io
very interesting, thanks for sharing! I am pretty much bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I have never tried their cloud collaboration tools.

What do you use for mail/calendar and file sharing? O365?

warrenm
>What do you use for mail/calendar and file sharing? O365?

At $WORK, we use O365 (I use Apple Mail & Calendar for my clients)

My primary customer is 100% O365 (no alternative clients allowed (but I'm running their VDI...so... )

I also use Gmail for personal stuff (again, with Apple Mail & Calendar as clients)

For file sharing ... there's a combination of O365/OneDrive (because of VDI constraints, I have to sign-in to OneDrive every time I login to my primary customer's network), iCloud, Dropbox, etc