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 |