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PickyDomains - Risk free domain naming service Your team works well together, solves problems, and comes up with innovative, unique ideas. Except when they don't. If your team is in a creative slump, here are five ways you can end it. 1. Identify the Blocks Denial is your enemy. Awareness is your friend. If everybody is sitting around, pretending like everything is going just fine, you need to step in. Open the discussion so that they can be open about their difficulties. Ask questions and listen to their answers. Chances are, they already know a few issues - or, perhaps, many - that are causing blocks. Set up a team meeting and talk about what is blocking the normal creative flow you have come to expect from them. The goal of the meeting should not be to destroy all creative blocks, but to figure out what they are. Sometimes, talking through the issue will prove to the solution. If communication problems, personality conflicts, or internal stress is the source of reduced creativit...

Ideas are worthless unless implemented. To make the most of those creative brains on your small team, you can’t have a brainstorming session and leave it at that. You need to have a system in place to manage ideas fr om the initial burst of insight to complete execution.   The Three Stages of   Idea Management   There are three essential stages in idea management:   Stage 1: Capture/Input Stage 2: Feedback/Analysis Stage 3: Decision/Action   All three stages are necessary. With a smaller team, you can move more quickly fr om one to another, but you still need to work in the right order to manage ideas effectively.   Stage 1: Effective Collection   The best ideas are often the ones that sound a little crazy. Sadly, those are the ideas we are most likely to reject because they sound, well, a little crazy. It’s important to create a truly   open space where all of the ideas can come out and introduce themselves . Welcome all ideas equally in order to...

Note - this article has been originally written for   TheNextWeb .   PR is hard. And expensive. Most of the time, you get nothing out of it. And when your company finally is mentioned in an article, even in a big publication, the results can be disappointing. Like that time when we got a whooping 169 visitors after getting into ZDNet .   Over the past two years, I’ve made a lot of PR mistakes. I’ve also got Bitrix24 into Forbes, VentureBeat, ReadWrite, PCWorld, PCMag, TechRepublic, CIO, ITWorld and 200+ other tech publications. I’ve learned that what you do with the article AFTER it’s published is frequently a lot more important than what do you before. And I am happy to share my insights with you.   1.   Pay for LinkedIn Inmail.   LinkedIn Inmail is the cheapest and most effective way to pitch journalists. My account cost me $100 a month and at least 50% of all mentions of Bitrix24 in the press are results of LinkedIn pitches. The most amazing thing about ...

So you are planning to launch a company intranet or want to replace your fossilized SharePoint portal. There are more than 30 intranet vendors to choose fr om and you are lost. After all, intranets aren't cheap and you don't want to make a mistake. Don’t worry, this intranet evaluation checklist will help narrow down your intranet choices to only the best solutions:   1. Cloud AND self-hosted.   You ONLY want solution that gives you these two choices and most vendors do. Cloud-based intranet services are usually very inexpensive and require no involvement fr om intranet developers who charge a pretty penny. That’s a plus. However, cloud intranets have few customization options and some, like Yammer, are known to have   regular and prolonged outages . You want to have an option to migrate to cloud (if your intranet budget is slashed) or go from cloud to server (if you need customization or for compliance in your industry) any time you want to. Stay away from vendors wh ere...

Slack  is all the rage these days. Twitter is full of excited slackers. VentureBeat says Slack will  change the workplace . TechCrunch  praises  Slack. So does pretty much every other media outlet. HipChat and Flowdock must be losing customers left and right, I imagine. Is there anything out there, that’s better than Slack?   I think so. To me, the best Slack alternative is  Bitrix24 . Not because it’s free for small teams and has affordable unlimited user plans, but because it offers tools that Slack should be offering. These are: 1.       Solo and group videocalls   Chat is fine and dandy, but sometimes you want to talk to a person. WebRTC makes video and audio calls from/to PCs and smartphones fairly easy to integrate into your collaboration platform and this is exactly what Bitrix24 did but Slack did not (yet).   2.      True file management   File sharing is fine. But I expect Dropbox-like fil...