Browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome
We're a web-application development firm, so we have to stay up on the latest browser challenges. That being said, we could fill many, many, MANY more blog posts about reasons for and against different browsers. Or you could just Google for this info. If you're not in the web-app business, just pick one and stick with it. Pick the one that the person with the most experience can help with, or that is recommended by your virtual-IT department. It is also to your advantage to let others experiment ("let your people be happy") so you have alternatives should your main browser fail in a specific function.
Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3) and Mingle
There's a whole world of SaaS infrastructure solutions with Amazon Web Services. We currently really dig S3 for storage/backup of our Subversion code repository and its counter-part EC2 as a virtual server for our project management software Mingle. The services are truly pay as you go – you can try a simple JungleDisk connection and see how just storing your favorite personal data in S3 will only cost pennies per month. Some people in this office pay less than 10 cents a month for this backup service! Even at 20 gigs, it's still only $5 a month!
Mingle is one graduated step from Google Spreadsheets in the direction of Agile project management. We're still trying it out, on an EC2 instance. It's very flexible and well template, but can be a little slow at times. Agile PM software abounds in many flavors, and we're on the hunt for one that is as effective and inexpensive as Google's apps. In the mean time, Mingle is worth a trial project or two if you're interested. They may still have their 'Free' 5-user license out there.
GoDaddy.com, Dotster, DynDNS and Subversion
GoDaddy or Dotster are great places to manage your domain names. Lots of options. Lots of controls. Pretty easy to use and other SaaS services like Blogger are now writing custom instructions for people when they have to integrate a domain name with the service.
For the two boxes that do sit in our office, we originally started with a Dynamic IP address instead of a Static IP address to a) allow us to put the server anywhere since we were working from houses, porches and free office space for 3 months and b) save the $10 a month. DynDNS was a great way for us to have a permanent address for clients to access our internal machines, but after we landed regular office space this felt like 'cheap ego' masquerading as 'frugal wisdom'. We spent too much time maintaining the connection to the servers to not pay $10 extra a month.
Subversion – the second hub of our business aside from Google Apps. Also referred to as SVN, this repository software works great with a TortoiseSVN client for windows (there is a Mac client too) to keep a versioned history of all of your local-hard drive work, that can be collaborated on with the rest of the team through branching, tagging and merging. I would imagine that as the bonds between repositories, project management, continuous integration and SaaS get stronger, we'll eventually just use that SaaS service.
Next Time: Part 2e, Social Networking at the Shop
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