When considering what solutions we should adopt to run and expand our business, we came up to the following list of applications & solutions that help us manage knowledge, share our thoughts on blogs, track social impact, keep track of projects & all communications, bill our time & projects, keep customer relations & more.

Here is the list of solutions we find out helpful. We thank to developers of all below mentioned solutions for their valuable effort.

Web Site: Drupal

We have chosen Drupal CMS for it's flexibility. It is equipped with a lot of features supporting our international expansion. It supports tracking various languages under it's own domain (ie atollon.cz, *.sk, *.com.br, *.ro, etc.). It helps a lot when localizing content to several countries. The stronger part is it's robustness, the worse part is it's relatively more difficult administration. If you are a beginner, we suggest implementing Wordpress or turn to your Web Design firm to provide you with full service.

Blog: Posterous

We have chosen Posterous for blogging service. It is extremely easy to set-up your blog in 5 minutes. Even beginners can handle this task with ease. Once you have your domain (ie atollon.com), you may easily change your DNS settings to keep your blog under the same domain name, which looks a bit more professional (ie http://blog.atollon.com). You can create several accounts for contributors & involve your team in your blogging efforts.

Knowledge Base: MindTouch

MindTouch is Wiki-style open source knowledge management solution. It is extremely easy to use and supports multi-lingual wiki sites. The main reason why we selected this Wiki is it's access rights structure. There are not many wikis available with easy to use access rights management of protected content. You are able to create sections that are public, semi-public or private. This allows us to keep our most valuable content in one solution. Before we started adopting MindTouch, we used about six separate wikis. Now we're slowly transferring all to new centralized solution.

CRM, Project Management, Communication, Billing: Atollon.net

We are developers of Atollon software solutions. Therefore we (naturally) selected our own solution for tracking our tasks, projects, time sheets, communication, calendars, documents & reporting. The solution is being developed since 2006 and has so far over 100 real life implementations in it's beta phase, ranging from small teams to larger companies with hundreds of users. We see the main benefit that the solution takes care about the whole client life-cycle, from tracking web site leads, over automated e-mail responses, mass mail, individual support options, production process controlling to billing.

Social monitoring: TweetDeck

There are several tools being used in our company. The benefit of TweetDeck is it's ease of use, many channels supported, filtering of keywords. The disadvantage of this tool is that it often distracts during work day. You should make sure that you dedicate only fraction of your day to track your social impact.

Disclosure: We are developers of Atollon solution and we are enthusiastic about it!