Cloud services that help us every day

by Jonathan Dahl

We in Alconost actively use cloud services. For such a distributed team as ours (only 20% of the team works in the office), this is just a find - the work is as quick and smooth as if our employees were sitting next to each other. Briefly about what cloud tools we use and love - in this post.

We have long chosen a truly convenient cloud service for managing tasks. We tried Bitrix24, Megaplan, Jira - all these are wonderful systems in their own right, but we needed something very simple, fast, that would fit our style of work. As a result, we stopped at the Trello - a concise and very convenient tool. With him, however, you have to invent and hone your work methodology - but it's worth it. In fact, they are boards with stickers-tickets moving from the “Idea” or “Suggestion” column to the “Made” column. We began to use Trello to solve small current tasks (add a description of services on the site, find a translator into Mongolian, etc.) and very quickly saw that we could conduct global long-term projects in it. Now we have completely transferred to Trerello the management of the process of creating videos , large localization projects, and even projects to develop our own products. Trello lives both on the desktop and on smartphones, which is the coolest. Now tasks are always with you in your pocket, even on the road.

We completely abandoned offline programs and documents. We work exclusively with Google Docs with texts, presentations and spreadsheets: as a result, we have the convenience of text coordination, fast joint editing, and accessibility of documents from any device. We also use Google Drive's cloud storage for all of the above - and the videos we make.
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Our pride and one of our know-how is how we manage large translation projects through the clouds. We use various cloud platforms — for example, Crowdin — to simplify the interaction between translators and our clients — the developers for whom we are localizing. It is so convenient that we wrote a separate post on Habré about this solution.



Our site also translates through Crowdin

Transferred to the cloud and sales. We use the CRM-system Close.io , a little having finished it under our requirements. As in the case of Trello, we needed to develop our strategy for working with this system. But now we believe that this is the best choice we could make.

For communication within the team use Slack . The team moved there from Skype group chat in 20 minutes, the last employee turned off the lights. In Slak, we liked it so much that we switched to a paid data plan that gives access to an unlimited message history.

Mail - Gmail , also cloud.

Telephony - VoIP , also, in fact, the clouds.

Talking about the site, servers outside the context of cloud hosting is no longer necessary - as it happens in another way, only old-school bearded admins in their 40s already remember.

And the meat itself is how all these cloud platforms and tools integrate with each other. For example, when a client fills out a pre-order form on the website, the attached files are uploaded to Google Drive, and we receive an email with links to download. Along the way, the Slack team receives a notification about a new order + SMS notification to managers. The client immediately enters the CRM and is automatically invited to subscribe to our newsletter.

It is noteworthy that to implement such integrations it is not even necessary to write code. We again use the cloud-based “integration bus” Zapier .

Perhaps, there is no such part of the business that we would not trust with the cloud service. It is really convenient, reliable and allows you to grow. After all, cloud technologies are constantly evolving, and we are evolving after such guys as Google or Apple.

We are such hardcore cloud lovers that we even spawned 2 of our own cloud services. The Maki Cloud Video Generator works directly in the browser. A live online translator Nitro regularly helps us in our work: now and then you need to subtract letters in English, which we send to clients. Still, English is not native for us, unlike our translators-netivov.

All clouds!


about the author

Alconost is engaged in the localization of applications, games and websites in 60 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.

We also make advertising and training videos - for websites selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliners, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.

Read more: https://alconost.com