There's an app for that?

I've used it for all work communication for the last 5 years or so. I think generally you would choose to use either slack or teams. But it sounds like your company doesn't really use the direct messaging functionality of Teams and instead just uses it for video meetings?

In the companies I have worked in - we don't use email at all internally and all communication happens in channels in slack. It's great for collaboration - but the nature of the medium (much like this forum) is that useful information disappears in a flurry of messages and you'd be better off using collaborative tools like confluence or other wiki software for any long lived knowledge sharing.

One sort of nice thing about teams is that it has wikis built in to the teams. It isnt the nices thing to use though. Slack was used at my previous place, but wasnt much use to me and just seemed to duplicate existing functionality (messaging etc.).

Thanks for the input all! I hadn't heard of Discord either.

csl said:

I've used it for all work communication for the last 5 years or so. I think generally you would choose to use either slack or teams. But it sounds like your company doesn't really use the direct messaging functionality of Teams and instead just uses it for video meetings?

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Correct. I moved from a much larger consultancy who adopted Lync, Skype for Business then Teams really early on and it gave them a huge competitive edge due to the ability to communicate with technical expertise all over the globe.

I find it pretty frustrating that I can't drop someone a quick IM. People actively log out of Teams in our business and suggest others call them on their mobile (with a gleeful twinkle in their eye) so I can see full adoption being somewhat difficult!

What I can see it being used for is sharing stuff within the industry like when things have gone wrong (or right, but mostly wrong) and new ways of simplifying our output (yesterday for instance I was able to use an existing Excel sheet we use regularly with =index() and a data table to do several hundred of the same calculations and the output is really visual, basically a heat map of pass/fail checks across a site). I can't see it ever going in the direction of full Wiki like content as we've got codes, standards and supplier literature coming out of our ears! Likewise, we've got a significant amount of past projects and it's easy enough to find one that's similar and start from that.

Dir. 1 thinks the Teams interface is dull. He seems to be wowed by Slack.

Anti said:

I don't use it but when I thought that it looks remarkably like the interface of Discord it turns out it is. Basically just a more "business" version of it. Might be worth trying Discord as it's free depending on your size.

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We're small: 3 Dirs. 1 Associate Dir., 1 Principal, 2 Engineers, 1 (very) PT assistant, and are looking for 2 more (Engineers).

Is anyone using an Android based app to keep on top of receipts and expenses?

Usually for work these things are fairly limited (i.e. a few fuel receipts etc.) but that changes next week and I've been warned to be on top of it.

I've got a business account with starling and their app is good for this. In the free version you can upload receipts etc for each transaction. Annoyingly you need to upgrade (£70/yr ISH) to export the data for the accountant, but it was otherwise painless.

Obviously reliant on having an account with them in the first place.

Thanks Remus, I don't as I went with Metro for the travel type thing and suspect a week is insufficient time to change that (plus hassle etc.).

I just scan every receipt with one drive and in the end of the month zip the file and send it to the accountant.

Paul B said:

Is anyone using an Android based app to keep on top of receipts and expenses?

Usually for work these things are fairly limited (i.e. a few fuel receipts etc.) but that changes next week and I've been warned to be on top of it.

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We have SAP Concur at work that I use occasionally and it seems easy enough, but you might need a SAP System for it to interface with though, and don't know if it's free.

Depends what you want and what systems it needs to interface with.

E. G. I use toggl for time tracking and booking to projects, then made a simple spreadsheet so I could export weekly reports to the correct format.

If its just for storing the receipts, any number of native apps let you do that. If you want it to also tot stuff up, track me age etc there are also apps that can do that. I looked into it in my old job, but have limited requirement for it now.

Fultonius said:

If its just for storing the receipts, any number of native apps let you do that. If you want it to also tot stuff up, track me age etc there are also apps that can do that. I looked into it in my old job, but have limited requirement for it now.

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More this. The time code is pretty simple as it's a client secondment so 100% to them (they may want me to book internally though but I'll deal with that as and when).

Everything for the assignment is essentially on them (as it's short term rather than long term).

thunderbeest said:

I just scan every receipt with one drive and in the end of the month zip the file and send it to the accountant.

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If only... What's the timecode for doing timesheets/expenses again?