Nearly four years ago, the transformation process began, including clarifying and rethinking the organizational structure, shifting the leadership’s mindset, changing the atmosphere by moving to a new office, refreshing the team with new employees, and standardizing internal tools and platforms. The last point is especially interesting from an IT perspective.
The renewal process took place iteratively, just like the development of our products, and we accepted that our choices were not final—meaning we could change them over time. Before settling on the tools and services we use today, we tried several alternatives.
We kept git for version control but switched from Gitolite to GitLab. For management and board tools, we tried Trello, Jira, and YouTrack. Eventually, we chose the latter because it offered the best price-to-value ratio. We have been satisfied with JetBrains tools overall, which is one reason many of us switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA. Still, it is worth noting that despite this, our flagship product, DOKK5, can still be developed and built using both environments. This way, there are no ideological debates about preferences.
The communication tool that proved most useful was Slack, reducing workflow interruptions. We recently tested Hangouts Meet, but it is still too basic, so Slack remained our choice.
While speaking of communication, we should mention that we updated our website. It became fresher, clearer, and more engaging. We also started focusing more on social media and launched our own professional blog.
We introduced 360° evaluations, now powered by our own Horizont system.
Still, the biggest impact came from moving to G-Suite, Google’s service package developed specifically for companies.
Naturally, our email moved there first—after all, who isn’t satisfied with Gmail? But it brought many other benefits as well, such as Calendar, Groups, Forms, Keep, and most importantly, unlimited Drive storage. With this, we replaced our NAS used for file sharing, eliminated separate backup storage, and finally gained reliable group sharing capabilities.
Thanks to G-Suite, we reduced the number of different software tools we used, increased oversight (company policies—for example, disabling sharing outside the domain), gained cloud-based data access, and OAuth login support. All of this comes with high availability.
These improvements alone were a major quality boost. But as a software developer, it was Google Apps Script that truly showed me how G-Suite offers much more than simply bundling Google products into a single service.
With my Script Your Own Company series aimed at decision-makers and DevOps developers, I aim to showcase the possibilities behind Google Apps Script.