Alternatives to Doodle and other collaborative tools

Scheduling meetings and appointments with Doodle or sharing information via Dropbox is an extremely practical way to carry out our day-to-day activities. It's nevertheless worth the effort to look for alternative services that offer similar functionality, because data protection and data security should not be neglected at work.

The use of commercial, but ostensibly free services can be problematic. Critical issues include data protection, forwarding confidential data to services that are not trustworthy or which are financed with ads, and sharing user data.

With this in mind, we'd like to outline several offerings from TUM, LRZ, DFN and the Bavarian government, as well as license-free alternatives and certified services from trustworthy instances.

Services that can be integrated into your website

Type Service name Provider Information
Formulare Feedback/contact form: portal TUM Documentation
Short URL Short URLs for TUM, myTUM and MWN addresses TUM KurzURL
Geodata/Maps BayernAtlas State Office for Surveying and Geoinformation BayernAtlas
  Open Street Map OpenStreetMap Community http://www.openstreetmap.org
Video streaming service Multimedia streaming server LRZ Video Server

Data sharing

Type Service name Provider Information
Cloud storage (synchronization over multiple devices and sharing with other persons) Sync&Share LRZ Sync&Share
Data sharing Gigamove DFN Gigamove
Online workgroup storage TeamDrive TeamDrive German cloud storage provider with a data protection seal of approval from the independent Schleswig-Holstein Center for Data Protection www.teamdrive.com/de/

Voting, communication and collaboration

Type Service name Provider Information
Webmail Mail.tum.de LRZ TUM Mail
Meeting scheduler / simple polling / voting MyVote TUM MyVote
  DFN-Terminplaner DFN Terminplaner
Instant messaging Jabber TUM Jabber XMPP
  Jabber TUM myTUM Jabber
Wiki TUM Wiki TUM / LRZ TUM Wiki
Document Processing ShareLaTeX TUM ShareLaTeX