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Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Flowdock is being used by a specific team inside an IT department of Universidade de São Paulo. We use this software for team collaboration, specifics communications and quick file sharing. To avoid a lot of calls and flooding e-mail boxes during the day, a centralized platform divided in differents channels can be very helpful. We could easily improve team communication working in several projects by using channels functionality to separate subjects, to share files and contents of interest and to keep tracking our development and activities. When we need some past information you can just go to the software and search for this. Keeping a track (history) of our activity is really important for us.
Pros
- Possibility to integrate with external services such as e-mail (send messages to a flow inbox from your e-mail), twitter, github, confluence, jira, single sign-on, etc. Using those integrations you can easily improve your team productivity by centralizing all useful information in just one point.
- Very easy to configure. You can get it running for your company or team in a few minutes. Furthermore, almost all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android) have an app to install and there is a web version that can also be used.
- Powerful communication tool. You can separate differents subjects in to separated "flows" or channels. In addition, you can invite people to join just one channel increasing privacy for others members.
- Free version up to 5 users. If you are a non-profit organization or have a student project, they say that is possible to work with that too. In other case, you have to pay per user/month.
Cons
- One thing a little bit annoying is that a lot of links to others Flowdock sections (preferences, external services, etc) will open a new window/tab. Each click may take you to a new window and you can get lost easily.
- There isn't a quick access list to members of your organization to start a private chat. I took a while to find how to do that. The interface and usability could be better.
- There isn't an app for Windows Phone.
- Sometimes you try to load some conversation and it doesn't show anything. It is not frequently but happens sometimes.
Likelihood to Recommend
Flowdock is well suited for small teams and to environments that doesn't need too much reliability. I think it has some management problems that can make your life difficult if you have to manage a big amount of users. If you want just a tool communication with basic features (without using any integration or robust features) it can be suitable for you. You should try Flowdock using its free version for a small team and compare with others similar products. Flowdock delivers team chat and collaboration features, but is not necessarily the best product. Maybe some usability problems that disturb me won't be so relevant to you.
