Friday, July 27, 2007

Jane Hart's Top Ten Tools

Jane asked me to submit my top ten tools for her listing. Reading the others, I thought this was quite an interesting exercise and can give some helpful pointers for anyone on tools to make themselves more productive.

Here's my list:

Firefox: My window onto the web. Much preferred to IE and loads of open source innovation.
MindManager: Our most important business tool. I use it to mindmap pretty much everything - research, interviews, analysis. Anyone that's worked with Elearnity will recognise this!
Google: The definitive search tool for the web.
Bloglines: My other window onto the web, this time for tracking blogs and news mainly. Read a huge volume via this.
Yugma: Tried a lot of live collaboration tools and this is one of the simplest and best for small group collaboration. Works well and very flexible.
MyBlogLog/Google Analytics: Real time analytics on our blogs and research sites. Also couple this with Google Analytics.
Dreamweaver: Great basic tool for maintaining our web sites
Blogger: Basic blogging tool. Not fab but simple and does the job.
Linked In: Been using this for some time and network seems to be slowly expanding. Sure I can make more use of it and Facebook (if I only had the time)
Lotus Notes: Been using this as our core infrastructure for 11 years, and still struggling to find a platform that offers the same breadth of flexibility for collaborative applications including our research knowledge centre. Email sucks but less virus targetted than Outlook.

Jane's list is prettier though with the logos and links!