The Flat World Tool Belt

Over at Command C, Sara Beacon posted several benefits to having been around a few years as a company. Having a consistent place to work. Established workflows and systems. Flat World Knowledge has been around for nearly 4 years now, and we feel the same way. Each year we need to assess our tool belt, and reflect upon ways to improve our workflow. We offer open textbooks under a Creative Commons license and strive to use open technologies when possible in the spirit of open source.

So, here’s a few of the tools we use. What’s your experience with them? Are there tools with similar functionality that we should take a look at?

Project Management: @task. We work with as many as 10 project managers - both internal and external. Prior to @task, each Project Manager would use their own style of "managing" - anything from pure email, to using excel spreadsheets, or google docs. We quickly knew we had to find a solution where we can all use the "same language" to be able to manage individual projects as well as to get a birds eye view on how everything looks in general. @task helped us get there.

CRM: SalesForce. We started using SalesForce in 2011, and will be rolling out to our customer-facing team members in 2012.

Email: GoogleApps. Naturally.

Backup: Backblaze. The ability to backup into and from the cloud has been invaluable to us over the past year.

Document Sharing: Alfresco. We’re a publisher. We have documents. A lot of documents. Alfresco is how we upload and share our them, via our FTP Service, Filezilla. For book-length PDFs, we may share those with our authors via Dropbox.

Email marketing: We use Silverpop for email marketing campaigns. Flat World’s editorial group uses Mailchimp for mail merges and contacting potential authors.

Freelancers: We use Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk to accuracy check quantitative material, like problem sets. For content in the humanities, we use freelancers from elance for literature reviews and fact-checking. Making use of an elastic workforce allows us to bring content to market faster.

That's a pretty quick rundown of what's under our hood.

1. What are your experiences with these tools?
2. Are there others that we should look at?
3. Which tools are you going to try in 2012?