Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

March 2022

15+ Best Productivity Apps - Save Money, Time and Effort

Coffee could be killing your productivity. As former Googlers say, relying on your morning cup of Joe is likely to worsen your work rate. But there’s also one thing that can actually boost your output – not undermine it. I’m talking about productivity tools. They save our time, effort and money – even if we indulge ourselves in a cup of coffee once in while. So let’s talk about productivity software. At Chanty we are keen on exploring digital tools.

Future-proofing your customer experience with asynchronous messaging

In a recent study commissioned by Zendesk, just 39% of customer service agents said they were confident they could respond to customers in a conversational, convenient way. And only 32% said they could effectively manage and monitor customer requests during the working day. Both of these findings reveal powerful truths. Customer service staff often feel overwhelmed, particularly when they have to respond to everything quickly.

Zulip 5.0: Threaded open-source team chat

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 5.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day. Zulip’s 100% open-source software is available as a managed cloud service or a self-hosted solution.

How Courier Became SOC 2 Type 2 Compliant

The consumerization of SaaS has resulted in a massive handling of PII (personally identifiable information) over recent years. The security and protection of said PII has therefore become central to the foundation of a quality SaaS product, and Courier is no different. In a world where there seems to be a new data breach every time we look, users continuously demand transparency into how their data will be handled.

Marketing Automation Vs Sales Automation

Assuming you are yet to begin automating your emails and work processes. You might be confused whether you want a sales automation or a marketing automation platform as there are multiple similarities between them. Both the tools can track inbox activities, iitiate event-based activities & guarantee to expand deals and income. Though there are lots in common, it is essential to understand them in and out.

A Big Step to address Big Tech

On Thursday, March 24th, the EU Parliament held its last debate on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and decided how strongly to bring Big Tech to heel. The EU’s intentions to ‘ensure fair and open digital markets’ have always been good, but there have been many points in the negotiations where the outcome could have been toothless - in particular around the interoperability obligation.

Building in-app chat with Rocket.Chat

Conversations are the lifeblood of every business, customer relationship, and community. So it's no surprise that many of the web and mobile apps we use daily now have conversational functionality. We all expect to be able to chat with our favorite companies, organizations, and communities at any time, anywhere. In-app chat is no longer a nice-to-have addition to the app - it's an expected part of the user experience.

Building In-App Chat With Rocket.Chat

Uber, Reddit, Facebook, your banking app, healthcare app. Every app thrives on the back of a strong chat experience. Building chat capabilities into your app, though, is a massive undertaking. (Don’t even get me started on maintaining those capabilities.) If in-app chat is in your roadmap, this session is 100% for you.

6 Instant Messaging Apps Students Love the Most

Instant messaging is by far one of the best inventions of humanity. We bet that many young people will agree with this statement. This technology enables us to stay in touch with literally anyone in real time despite the distance. And it’s especially important for students. With the help of messengers, students can chat with their family and friends. At the same time, they can connect with their classmates and teachers to create collaborative learning opportunities.

Comprehensive Guide on How to Achieve Effective Communication

Failure to meet deadlines, long email threads, disputes during meetings, poorly planned projects, missing files, delayed feedback, you name it. How about meetings where people are talking to each other and thinking they are discussing the same thing, but it is obvious that they don’t? Rings a bell? Of course, it does. We’ve all been there. Team communication isn’t always as effective as we’d want it to be, and it has a direct impact on every area of an organization.

10 best business instant messaging apps

Business instant messaging is not a nice-to-have addition to the workplace anymore. Instead, it is an integral communication practice for companies of all sizes. Remote and hybrid work models are becoming more prevalent. With the rise of digital workplaces, everybody needs a quick, efficient, and familiar way to communicate. Business instant messaging is exactly that.

8 Reliable Ways to Manage a Team

When managing a team, the first thing to get straight is that what's valid for individual assignments is also applicable for group projects. In other words, you will have to define the objectives, understand the tasks, and proceed with setting clear expectations. That said, in group work, you will have to face other complexities. Whether it is for a student project or handling a team in the office, you can try to implement the following practices to ensure the best outcome.

Organizing In-app Communication With Inbox Feed

Notifications—such as emails, SMS, or push notifications from an app—are a big part of daily life. Whether for work, fun, banking, or just to chat, mobile notifications tell us what we need to attend to and when. While some users like getting notifications so that they don’t miss out, others turn off most notification channels for the sake of peace. But if it’s your application, what can you do to make sure that you’re communicating effectively with your users?

Guide to Automating External Workforce Management

When you go from managing a team of in-house employees to managing an entire external workforce, it can be tough to keep up. You have to worry about payroll, benefits, scheduling and more. The best way to manage your external workforce is by automating as much of the process as possible with HR workflow automation solutions. Here are 20 tips for automating your external workforce management.

How to Secure Communication When Working Remote?

Managing a remote team's communication requires a bit more effort than if everyone were in the same office. You need to be deliberate about creating a communication strategy, ensuring everyone is on the same page with the office chat app, and making sure everyone feels comfortable sharing information. There are a few key things you can do to make sure your remote team's communication is secure.

6 best open source healthcare software

Open source software has been used in various industries across world regions for its specific advantages. More and more open source projects are being used as viable alternatives to expensive proprietary software. In highly regulated industries such as healthcare, data privacy regulations and complex IT environments may pose a challenge to keep up with the latest technology developments. That’s why many organizations turn to open source healthcare software.

The Best Chatting Apps for Business Productivity in 2022

A business cannot only survive on the number of clients it has; it must also increase its productivity to meet its goals and bring on new customers or clients. I don't think I need to remind you that team communication is critical to boosting business productivity, but I do believe you should be aware that a conventional or social messaging app will not suffice to do it.

Using Courier to Build Approval Workflows

Utilized by countless organizations, approval workflows arrange the hierarchy of teams and the sequence of tasks for the ultimate goal of improving collaboration and efficiency. In my experience as a software engineer, approval workflows are vital for peer code reviews, but that’s not the only use case. In this article, we’ll explore the difference between manual and automated approval workflows and what you’ll need to know if you decide to automate your workflow.

10 effective strategies for promoting team collaboration

Team collaboration in the workplace elevates teamwork to a new level. It enables groups to pool their skills, talents, and ideas to achieve a shared goal. Work collaboration, when done effectively, can have a good impact on your team or business. Collaboration can boost team efficiency, innovation, and relationships. According to Urubit, 33% of employees say that the ability to collaborate makes them more loyal.

DynamoDB Key Partition Strategies for SaaS

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for scalability and high performance. It’s one of the most popular databases used at SaaS companies, including Courier. We selected DynamoDB for the same reasons as everyone else: autoscaling, low cost, zero down time. However, at scale, DynamoDB can present serious performance issues.

What is Cyberbullying and How it Affects Work Productivity?

What is cyberbullying? Before learning about it, let's take a look at it in chronological order to get a better sense of cyberbullying impacts. The world has undergone the most significant transformation in its history. The present can seem weird to individuals who lived in the stone age when compared to the stone age. Perhaps if we were in the stone age none of us would have predicted that the stones would be sold as diamonds, and we will witness the evolution.

How to Boost Team Morale in Remote Teams: The Ultimate Guide to Fostering a Culture of Motivation Among Remote Teams

Remote working is the way of the world these days. While many employees love the flexibility of working from home avoiding busy commutes, there are also many challenges when it comes to managing remote teams and fostering team morale. Without the bustle of a shared office and team coffees during lunch breaks, employees can feel somewhat disconnected, and this can directly hinder business success. Undeniably, morale is essential for teams to succeed.

5 ways to make your software HIPAA compliant

HIPAA compliance is a must-have for healthcare-related organizations and their vendors. To do business in a secure manner and minimize the risk of exposing patients’ personal information, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and Health Tech organizations are looking to use software that ensures they adhere to HIPAA guidelines. In this article, we bring you the checklist to make sure your software is HIPAA compliant as well as actions to undertake to comply with HIPAA.

How to Upskill Your Remote Human Workforce?

As an employer, your responsibility doesn't end when you hire someone. You also need to make sure that your employees have the skills they need to do their jobs well. And this is especially important when it comes to remote workers. Below are some of the best ways to upskill your remote human workforce.

Smart Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration in 2022

In 2002, team collaboration was a relatively new concept. Email, instant messaging, and video conferencing were the primary tools used to communicate with team members located in different parts of the world. Today, team collaboration is an essential part of business operations. In 2022, businesses will need to find new and innovative ways to improve team collaboration in order to remain competitive. Here are some ideas to get you started.

10 best encrypted messaging apps for secure business communication in 2022

Many people are looking for encrypted messaging apps to securely communicate with their coworkers, friends, and family. While there are other ways to protect your data, end-to-end encryption has become a standard security feature in both consumer and business messaging apps. 🗝️ Find out what are the best encrypted messaging apps today, how encryption works, and how else you can ensure highest security standards while texting.

6 strategies to improve organizational communication

More and more companies introduce remote work policies. With a distributed workforce, organizational communication becomes more critical than ever. Uninhibited communication via various digital channels is a #1 priority when it comes to empowering employees in digital workplaces. Moreover, as hybrid work is slowly becoming a standard, communication needs to change the in-and-out-of-office conditions.

Moderation needs a radical change

Amandine Le Pape, COO at Element, explains how Element is funding moderation tooling and development for all of Matrix. Moderation of online information is topical for two completely unrelated reasons: Let’s face it, the traditional approach to moderation is fundamentally broken. It’s neither scalable nor compatible with the idea of interoperable communication. Something has to change.

How Remote Work Can Improve Developer Engagement and Retention

While many companies focus on building a better product or application, not enough thought goes into the teams that need to build those products. The frontline developers, designers, coders, and contributors that go into building something innovative and amazing often have needs when it comes to creating an environment where they feel valued. Coordinating a cohesive environment where your team feels valued, heard, and able to collaborate can be difficult, especially in the modern world of remote work.

6 ways workplace technology can boost productivity

We are surrounded by technology all the time, and for most of us - it’s a big distraction from our work. But technology doesn’t have to be a distraction. It’s actually quite the opposite, technology can act as a booster for your productivity. In independent research by Ultimate Software, 92% of employees say that technology helps them work better. As a matter of fact, digital workplace relies on multiple technologies.

Healthcare communication: 7 things you should know in 2022

Healthcare communication has changed immensely. What used to refer to doctor-patient communication now includes much more. The new ways of communication in our daily lives are also changing the way patients communicate with their healthcare and insurance providers. In 2022, we expect the existing healthcare communication trends to intensify. One of the major healthcare trends is live and in-app chat messaging: download our eBook to find out how it supports achieving an excellent patient experience.

Pushover Turns 10

Hi, I'm joshua stein, the proprietor of Pushover. 10 years ago this week, I officially launched the Pushover app on the Apple App Store and Google Play (back then called Android Market) and since then, support for Pushover's API has been integrated into countless services, products, open-source libraries, and one-off shell scripts and tools. To date, Pushover has delivered over 3 billion notifications to over 3/4 of a million users.

3 reasons why you need HIPAA-compliant chat

Healthcare institutions are increasingly looking for technological solutions to help them improve the patient experience. However, they still have to stay compliant with the most important data privacy regulation in the healthcare industry, HIPAA. Since live chat has become the new standard of patient communication, companies are investing in HIPAA-compliant chats.

How to Reduce Developer Tool Fragmentation for a More Productive Workflow

There’s never been quite so many helpful platforms and tools available to help developers ship code faster. But while an army of best-of-breed tools can help solve many of the problems your team faces, they introduce new challenges and complexities of their own. Contending with fragmented tools was the most common challenge cited in our recent survey of developer teams, with 39% of respondents calling it a major productivity challenge.

Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call!

Hopefully in-person meet-ups will prove much easier in 2022 - but, there’s still a need for video calls, so let’s face it, they’re here to stay. This makes it really exciting to present Element Call: the world’s first decentralised voice and video conferencing app powered entirely by Matrix!