Starting a company from a scratch is not an easy task! You need to decide on your business idea, have a solid business plan ready, hire the right people, organize your processes and daily routine with clients and staff while making sure everyone understand their role and navigate towards the same goal.

All of this can be very exhausting, but luckily there are plenty of resources, tools, and assets online you can use to make this process less painful.

Our original idea was to have all the tools, protocols, and methodologies in the same place so we can communicate with our Clients more efficiently and make it less confusing for our fellow developers, so we came up with a simple web page serving as a home page of what we call Sintezis Workbench.

From there you can see why and how we use specific apps and request to get access to the apps in our workbench. If you are a Client looking for access to your projects wiki, or an employee looking to get access to our Kanban board, dashboard.sintezis.co is thebest place to start.

Find it listed below separated into 4 main categories, each featuring our favorite aps and solutions we use in our day-to-day operations.

1. MANAGEMENT

Each project typically consists of various small tasks, and each task needs to be completed within a specific timeline. Task management system, combined with regular communication/chatting and videoconferencing tools like Slack and Zoom, willhelp you to automate and monitor a task through all its lifecycle and ensure proper execution.

SLACK is a place where people get work done, together. It is a better and easier way to communicate and it supports multiple channels and teams, file transfers, video conferencing calls etc. Depending on the size of your project and team either a new dedicated slack team will be created (usually under url of the format https://project_name.slack.com), or you will be granted a guest account and added to specific channels of your/yours Client slack team.

Slack provides apps for all mayor mobile and PC operating systems. To install it on yourdevice you will require the team url (eg. http://sintezis.slack.com), and your login credentials.

JIRA is the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. It allows its users to easily customize their workflows and helps teams to stay on track by using roadmaps to sketch out the big picture and communicate plans with stakeholders. With Jira, you can keep every detail of a project centralized in real-time.

ZOOM is a video conferencing platform allowing large groups to communicate at free rates. With ZOOM, you can schedule online meetings or trainings, host video webinars, or build collaboration-enabled conference rooms. Although we use vide calls within our paid slack teams, often we need to talk with people outside the team, so in that scenario we use the 45 min free intervals zoom offered as a freemium subscription. Zoom keeps you securely connected wherever you are.

2. DOCUMENTS SHARING

BOOKSTACK allows its users to document everything. Whether you need personal notes, knowledge bases for your team, or product docs for your users. We use it to create drafts, change them, discuss them, and just to easily track everything. The good thing about it is that you can quickly find exactly what you’re looking for and also share it with clients.

CLOUDFILE is a platform dedicated to file hosting and sharing. It allows you to use a browser or the storage system API to operate files and volumes. We can keep our documents private or share them with our users/clients.

DOCUSIGN is used for eSignatures. By using it, we can easily prepare, sign, act on, and manage our contracts. We can also automate agreement workflows and management, generate streamlined agreements, analyze, review, and approve them.

3. TOOLS

PORTAINER is the definitive open-source container management tool for Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm, and Azure ACI. It allows anyone to deploy and manage containers without the need to write code. We use it to simplify processes and streamline their operations.

SWAGGER allows us to simplify API development for users, clients, and a part of our team. It helps us design and document APIs at scale and share them with our clients.

FIGMA is a great tool that allows us to create, test, and ship better designs. It also allows us to bring our ideas to life faster in animated prototypes that feel like a real thing, that we can then share with the rest of our team or clients.

4. DEVELOPMENT

We use GITLAB to manage our projects and deliver the DevOps Platform as a single application. Having one interface, one conversation thread, and one data store let our team work together efficiently. GitLab is powerful, scalable, and it provides end-to-end automation in secure environment.

FIREBASE is Google’s mobile platform that allows us to accelerate app development with fully managed backend infrastructure. We can also release and monitor their performance and stability. We mostly use it for monitoring, testing apps, and some parts of the development.

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, and they provide a lot of useful services. We use AWS Elastic Computing (EC2) – cloud services, Amazon Lightsail – powerful virtual servers built for reliability and performance, and Amazon Route 53 that effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS.

So, there you have it! If you are looking for a way to start organizing your business, Sintezis Dashbord is here to make sure all team members, as well as clients, are on the same page.

Remember, agile organization of your processes and day-to-day operations is crucial tothe success of your business. Trust us, we learned it the hard way!