Why we don’t use Pimcore for everything
Needless to say, we love Pimcore and all the possibilities our solution offers. We believe in it 1,000 % and, of course, we could try to map all business processes and content/data management requirements at Pimcore within Pimcore itself. We have seen such attempts at other software providers before, but most of them were – let’s not sugarcoat it – pretty crappy!
We know exactly what Pimcore is capable of and how broadly it can be used in practice, but we also know when it is better to rely on other solutions and vendors – for instance, in knowledge or service management. Why reinvent the wheel when there’s a perfectly smooth-running wheel at our fingertips already?
Microsoft Teams
MS Teams is our tool of choice for quick and easy communication and collaboration. We use it for company-wide updates such as internal news or market news – but also for team chats (Get ready for the excessive use of memes!) and video conferences. Both are crucial elements of our hybrid culture, as they allow us to stay in close personal contact with our fellow crew members from all over the Pimcoverse.
Quick word of warning: You’ll never know who or what’s waiting for you on the other end of the line! The outfit choices of our Pimconauts are as unpredictable and crazy as space itself.
Atlassian Confluence & OneDrive
Word is so yesterday – wiki is today! Confluence is the world's largest corporate wiki platform, and we know why: easy setup, granular permissions, and sophisticated features. What’s not to love? We use it for both internal and external documentation and communication, including:
- documentation of jour fixes and meeting minutes
- department-specific content
- company-wide guidelines and templates
- market research, market knowledge and topic-related knowledge of our product domains
- information about our tools
- checklists
- onboarding plans
- and more!
In other words: If you're looking for something at Pimcore, you’ll probably find it in Confluence!
Certain files still exist, of course. Somehow, we still haven't completely done away with Excel and PowerPoint. But every day we say goodbye to one more PowerPoint presentation is definitely a good day in our books! If we do need them though, we save them in OneDrive, which allows for cloud-based collaboration as well. Fully integrated in Confluence, we avoid any redundancy in files.
Office 365
Of course, we also have Outlook and the entire Office range. E-mails, however, are primarily used for communication with external parties. Everything else is almost exclusively done via Teams – and we love that! Or at least, most of us do. We say “most” because our CEO proves to be an exception to this rule sometimes, but we'll get there eventually! Especially, since our COO has made it one of his life goals to change his mind …
Atlassian Jira
There are countless service management as well as task and productivity management solutions on the market. But there are only few that combine both and also perfectly integrate our existing development processes via Github. As you can imagine, that’s crucial for us.
What we like about it:
- the reduced interface (Yes, that’s actually possible with Jira!)
- high flexibility in the data model
- its extensibility as well as high integration capability
Service requests with guaranteed SLA response times are processed in a structured and reliable way in Jira. Our Client Success Team keeps track of their to-dos for our Enterprise & Cloud customers. And the Marketing Team plans all their awesome content in Jira Cloud. We use it as a cross-departmental solution for all tasks and planning. And in case that didn’t become pretty obvious by now: We love our Kanban Boards almost as much as astronauts love hot sauce (Google it – it’s really a thing!).
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is our single source of truth for all customer and partner relevant information. It’s a CRM that does what it’s supposed to. Without a lot of frills and excessive complexity. That’s why our partner managers and sales consultants like to work with the cloud-based solution every day. Simple and flexible configuration as well a customer relationship management with a focus on the essentials: That's what matters to us. Sensible automatisms make our daily work easier.
And let’s not forget: A perfect overview of all interactions with companies and contact persons has saved our ass more than once (Pardon our French!). It helps us get a grasp on things when necessary and to understand the current context of a conversation quickly.
Miro
For any creative pursuits, we love Miro. If you want to visualize your thoughts on an unlimited digital work surface with post-its, arrows and lines, MIRO is the perfect tool! We use it for workshop settings in different areas, brainstorming of concepts, or content coordination with clients. Even our management team likes to work with it. A round of applause for a state-of-the-art virtual collaboration tool!
Spotify
Yeah, true … This isn’t exactly a tool that’s required for work. But it’s still worth a mention here, because with the right music everything’s twice as fun. Most of our Pimconauts have either Spotify or some other music streaming service running in the background while they work. In the words of Jimmi Hendrix, “Music is a safe kind of high” – and who doesn’t need a little something (that’s not actual drugs) to keep spirits high throughout the day?
Editor’s note: Crew member Ciprian thinks Spotify is total bullshit because you won’t find any of the really good older songs there. So if you want to listen to “real music” – hand-curated by the one and only Cipri – you’ll have to go directly to him.
Final remark: A fully digital workplace is great …
… but only where it makes sense. Even though we love to travel through time and space and explore new galaxies together: We’re still human! Nothing beats having a cold after-work beer with the crew on our rooftop terrace in Salzburg or in a virtual meeting. As our CEO likes to say, “You only live once” – so we might as well have as much fun as possible together!
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