An Apple A Day – Day 13
Day 13, not a good number but not a bad day!
PollEverywhere
I began the day by downloading PollEverywhere and started a survey on the iPad to test how it would work as a survey tool until I get more development time around a native solution. This web-based survey tool is usually relegated to the speaking session surveys I do before and after my talks but I thought it may be a good tool to pilot for a different need. First time through with a pool of questions from an official survey and looks like this might be a good starting format. I like the ease of use and flowing through the questions. I docked the notes app on the side to keep personal notes on each of the questions as notes were options on the current PollEverywhere app. Things were looking promising!
Collaboration Day!!
I started out with downloading a huge set of collaboration tools and will try to share my thoughts around each one.
Microsoft Teams: This was up first, my company uses this to collaborate and I was curious as to how this translated to the native app and if it would fit my needs. Turns out, pretty well. I love the teams’ bot that can auto answer simple questions and works with several popular plugins. Maybe I’ll develop my own in the future if this becomes a mainstay within my team (no pun intended). I like that the forming of separate engagements and clients are starting to appear in the app as well. It gives a simple and complication free format to navigate. The meetings and calls integration is a welcome change as well.
Slack: Slack was up next. This was an oldie but goodie. The app was great, not plagued with the performance issues from several instances being opened at the same time like I had with my desktop. The magic linking was a little unintuitive but I got things running in short order. All the features I’ve come to love on the desktop app is there in the native app as well. With the addition of file manager in iOS 11, this also made saving and upload files a snap as well.
Dropbox: Up next on the list to check out. I downloaded and installed and added as I did the rest in the iPad files app. This will allow me to save and download from DropBox on demand. I immediately tested it and sure enough, smooth as butter and dead simple to use.
- I proceeded to do the same with Box as I did with DropBox, everything went off without a hitch.
SharePoint: This was more of a courtesy than a need. I wanted to have access to our current team site in SharePoint but would be getting rid of SharePoint before long as we are merging practices. Everything I needed from an access standpoint was there and the features honestly were pretty comprehensive. I don’t work enough in SharePoint to speak on the quality of the features but for what I needed, which was files and site navigation, it worked well.
Skype and Skype for Business: These are my two primary collaboration and instant messaging tools. For those who don’t slack, I can find them on Skype. I liked the interface and upon testing call quality on cellular and Wi-Fi, things proved to work well.
HipChat: Last but certainly not least, HipChat. This one has been around for quite some time and I only have one person I talk to on it but it’s a pretty important person. It did everything I needed it to and even worked with a few of his integrations around channel notifications and chat commands.
Finally, one last note… I felt the sting of forgetting the charging cable for the iPad today and was almost out of battery but luckily my wife came to the rescue. She truly is an awesome woman. Maybe it’s true what they say, behind every good man is a good woman.
Well, that’s all folks, looking forward to feedback and tomorrows chapter in the saga.