Qatalog’s work hub makes it easy to track team projects, goals, updates, and more. Across tools and timezones.

One work hub for the whole team | Qatalog

<h1>Your team&rsquo;s new best friend</h1>
<h4>Qatalog makes it easy to track team projects, goals, updates, and more. Calmly and quietly, across tools and timezones.</h4>

<h2 style="text-align: center;">Tools team up in Qatalog</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #7f7f7f;">Qatalog integrates with tools used by all your team members to power real collaboration</span></h3>

<h1 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #292929;">Stay connected</span></h1>
<h4 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #292929;">Qatalog makes sure projects and goals are clear to your team. So folks never feel in the dark on who&rsquo;s working on what.</span></h4>

<h1 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #fffef8;">Fewer meetings</span></h1>
<h4 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #fffef8;">Adding clarity shouldn&rsquo;t mean adding meetings to the calendar. Qatalog keeps people informed and frees up deep work time.</span></h4>

<h1 style="text-align: center;">Updates that flow</h1>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Qatalog funnels team updates across the chain easily. And makes team milestones and priorities visible to all.</h4>

<h2 style="text-align: center;"><strong>The pains of work are real</strong></h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #7f7f7f;">We spoke to hundreds of teams. Here's how we can help.</span></h3>

<h2 style="text-align: center;">Protect your team&rsquo;s time and energy &mdash; yours too</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #7f7f7f;">Work pulls your team in different directions. Qatalog keeps you whole.</span></h3>

Qatalog makes it simple to set goals and track progress. So they don’t get lost in random sheets.

Goals: Priorities you don’t set and forget

Projects in Qatalog link resources, posts, and goals, so people’s work really gets noticed, and appreciated.

Projects: Spotlight your team’s work

Qatalog posts get distributed in Slack and email, always in context with projects and teams. Without interrupting anyone.

Posts: Updates made easy

GDPR & CCPA compliant

Pen-tested

SSL certified

Your team’s data is safe and secure.

Bring your team together

<p>The last time you shared your screen with colleagues, you shared a lot more than the latest version of a presentation. You let your colleagues into your work home. Not the work home with the new backdrop setup for Zoom meetings. The work home that you look at for hours everyday &mdash; your laptop screen, and all the tools and docs and other things packed into it.</p>
<p>What do they usually see? If you work in a modern company, there's a good chance it's a jungle of Slack messages, Google docs, Asana tasks, or code in GitHub that you&rsquo;d been switching between right before the meeting started. Unless you minimized the windows, so it's all just waiting for you after the call.</p>
<p>Your work home is a powerful indication of whether you&rsquo;re operating in a place of peace, order, and balance &mdash; or somewhere else.</p>
<p><em>For most, that place is somewhere else.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p>We have a new SaaS app for every niche need, to the point where each team in a company seems to go out of its way to use a different tool. And each tool, each browser tab, each alert creates an environment more like a carnival than a zen home.</p>
<p>In our attempt to promote new ways of working, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/lost-in-the-jungle-of-workspace-apps-2020/" rel="follow">we&rsquo;ve adopted too many SaaS tools</a> that in aggregate produce a counter-effect. We&rsquo;ve gone full-circle.</p>
<p>There are of course many incredible SaaS applications out there. But the ability to balance them together so they don&rsquo;t interfere with each other, or become walls, has become a rare art.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Perhaps nowhere is this pain more acute than in tech companies experiencing the havoc of hyper-growth. But the challenges certainly aren&rsquo;t limited to this group. Any company that segments its work by teams has employees that battle this complexity on a daily basis. Teams develop micro-cultures with their own language, acronyms, data, work styles, and now tools.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Layer on top of this concoction the fact that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2020/09/08/new-research-suggests-the-future-of-work-is-a-flexible-one/?sh=65e254ca3267%2080-90%%20of%20knowledge%20workers%20conducting%20their%20work%20from%20home%20during%20the%20pandemic" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">90%</a> of employees are operating in a remote capacity&mdash;many for the first time&mdash;and we have a perfect storm of SaaS app chaos.</p>
<p>As a surprisingly <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2020/07/08/are-we-entering-a-new-world-of-remote-work/?sh=398aed965959" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">large number of jobs can be done remotely</a>, and many companies have implemented remote work plans that are <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/01fd6ad5-b062-4699-b098-ab81bdc8f7b2">unlikely to reverse</a>, this new paradigm means a stark contrast will emerge between companies that are problem-aware and nail these challenges head-on, and those that flutter in this increasingly digital work life.</p>
<p><em>So what symptoms should team leaders watch for?</em></p>
<h2><b>The new way of work reduces noise</b></h2>
<p>A typical knowledge worker makes <a href="https://www.inc.com/heidi-zak/adults-make-more-than-35000-decisions-per-day-here-are-4-ways-to-prevent-mental-burnout.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">35,000</a> micro-decisions a day. It&rsquo;s a constant struggle not only to make all those decisions, but to determine what data points should inform them, and what can be discarded. With the rise of <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-right-mindset/201910/the-rise-and-grind-hustle-culture" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">hustle culture</a>, many think it&rsquo;s just a matter of working harder. Not smarter.</p>
<p>Much of this can be addressed by fostering a culture that <much of="" this="" can="" be="" addressed="" by="" fostering="" a="" culture="" that="" span=""><a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90547415/6-key-traits-leaders-must-develop-for-the-future-of-work" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">values quality over quantity</a>. It's also important to make sure that people, teams, and projects are visible and accessible across the organization, without the need for real-time coordination. Because <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/09/remote-work-doesnt-have-to-mean-all-day-video-calls" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">all-day video meetings</a> result in no time to get s%$&amp; done.&nbsp;</much></p>
<p>This balance between synchronous and asynchronous is critical to getting the context you need to work productively.</p>
<h2><b>Eliminates constant context-switching&nbsp;</b></h2>
<p>But once people are freed from video calls to really get down to work, the struggle to cycle between tools also becomes very real. This form of multi-tasking can lead to a <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201209/the-true-cost-multi-tasking">40%</a> loss of productivity.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the SaaS market is <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-computing-now-even-more-of-your-apps-are-about-to-make-the-jump/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">expected to keep growing</a>&mdash;as companies who signed onto different productivity and collaboration tools during the pandemic are <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/19/why-bessemers-byron-deeter-thinks-saas-companies-could-grow-even-faster-in-2021/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">unlikely to turn them off</a>&mdash;so the cognitive weight of all this context-switching may very well grow.&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="https://qz.com/work/1561830/why-the-eight-hour-workday-doesnt-work" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">According to one study</a>, the optimal way to multi-task is to do 52 minutes of work with 17-minute breaks. We&rsquo;re not robots, but these types of benchmarks can provide a healthy reminder to stop app shuffling and start focusing.</p>
<h2><b>Makes routines collective</b></h2>
<p>Of course, most companies don&rsquo;t operate with school-like schedules of defined periods and transition times to get between classes. But they could certainly use <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b5d70caa-bd91-4613-a944-3654990643ea" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">better collective routines</a>.</p>
<p>Fortunately, collective routines don&rsquo;t always need to be done at the same time. For example, team members could each start their day by looking at a common dashboard, even if they&rsquo;re in different time zones. Or they could each finish their day by posting an update with just enough detail, and for the right audience.</p>
<h2><b>Improves visibility</b></h2>
<p>When team members don&rsquo;t know what they don&rsquo;t know, collaboration can only go so far. No wonder employees say transparency is <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamcraig/2018/10/16/10-things-transparency-can-do-for-your-company/?sh=7ff8ce4025d0" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">the number one factor in determining their work happiness</a>. Teams that make their work discoverable to colleagues when they produce a new artifact, for example, can make significant strides in building a sense of connection.</p>
<p>This is especially the case for distributed teams, where <a href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/five-ways-leaders-can-support-remote-work/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">frequent, transparent, consistent communication becomes essential</a>. Without it, team members will <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/350724" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">parse the meaning</a> of emojis, phrases, or punctuation to an unnerving degree.</p>
<h2><b>Stops process confusion</b></h2>
<p>Helping your teams transform their digital work homes into true clearings also means taking the ambiguity out of basic procedures. Defining clear, step-by-step processes for activities like onboarding remote hires or getting sign-off for a virtual event can have a surprisingly massive impact on morale.&nbsp;</p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.thehrdirector.com/business-news/flexible-agile-working/appzen-survey-reveals-impact-of-covid-and-remote-work-on-employee-expense-claims/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">83 percent </a>of employees who received an updated work from home expense policy said their employer fairly compensates them, compared to only 29 percent where the policy wasn&rsquo;t updated.</p>
<p>To be sure, in most of the corporate world, there&rsquo;s no shortage of procedure. But with distributed work on the rise, there&rsquo;s a new opportunity to define lightweight processes for the sake of clarity. Otherwise, too much flexibility can actually <a href="https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/future-of-work-leadership-flexibility" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">stress employees out</a>, to the point of not knowing when to start and stop work.</p>
<h2><b>Hope amid a sea of SaaS apps</b></h2>
<p>Awareness of these problems alone will not solve them. And in high-growth, segmented, or distributed organizations, it can be both socially and technically complex to achieve a sense of cohesion between teams.&nbsp;</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s talk of a need for a <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3913794/create-a-culture-of-digital-dexterity-with-the-new-work-" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">new work nucleus</a>, or a new <a href="https://kwokchain.com/2019/08/16/the-arc-of-collaboration/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">metalayer</a> that bridges the many gaps between teams and within them. Knowledge workers, managers, and executives all need to find that glue that lets them escape the digital mayhem.</p>
<p>Businesses that figure this out will win. The coming months and years of work will be led by companies that empower their distributed workforces to operate with a different type of rhythm. They&rsquo;ll attract top talent, grow market share, and earn the type of soft power that you hear about in politics&mdash;the non-tangibles that create gravitas. And they&rsquo;ll define a new way of work.</p>
<p>Those that just turn on <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/communication-overload/" rel="follow">Zoom all day</a>, trying to replicate the in-person, will run out of time.</p>

The ability to balance all the productivity SaaS tools out there in a complementary fashion has become a rare art. Businesses that figure this out will win.

It’s time to define a new way of work | Qatalog

There are many incredible SaaS applications out there. But the ability to balance them all together in a complementary fashion has become a rare art.

It’s time to define a new way of work

<p>Documentation apps play a key role in your virtual workspace.</p>
<p>Tools like <a href="https://www.google.com/drive/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Google Drive</a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and</span> <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/paper" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Dropbox Paper</a> offer secure cloud-based storage for all your important files, which can then be shared with the whole team. These tools allow you to store documents and work on them at the same time, making them core business solutions that most of us have been familiar with for years.&nbsp;</p>
<p>There are hundreds of these apps and tools that allow teams to get things done and share work from any device. The idea of these apps is to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-performance-management-software/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-documentation&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener">level up performance</a> and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener">collaboration</a>, and many do. However, the interconnectivity of these tools can still be a friction point for teams. For example: when was the last time a member of the sales team could easily view a design file?&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<h2><strong>Importance of documentation</strong></h2>
<p>Documentation commits the expectations, boundaries, and consequences of teamwork, so that hire <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/company-culture-and-documentation-culture/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">number 500 can have the same perspective as hire number five.</a></p>
<p><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/raise-your-work-standards/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Productive knowledge management</a> starts with documentation, which drives clarity and conviction &mdash; and is the reason why documents, spreadsheets, and slides are the lifeblood of knowledge workers.</p>
<p><span>Problems with documentation start with inconsistencies. If your company is working with multiple tools,&nbsp;</span><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-management-tool-vs-work-hub/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">different teams might create files in each of them</a><span>. When Design creates tasks in Asana, Engineering works in JIRA, Operations writes notes in Confluence, Marketing stores business contacts in Hubspot, and the Sales team uses Salesforce, things can get out of control quickly. That's how knowledge silos begin.</span></p>
<p>That being said, you need to start with the best documentation software in the game. Below you&rsquo;ll find a list of documentation software the Qatalog team loves.&nbsp;</p>
<h2><strong>Best documentation apps</strong></h2>
<h3><b>1. Google Drive</b></h3>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;">&ldquo;Document management is the cornerstone of knowledge creation, and the reason why documents, spreadsheets, and slides are the lifeblood of knowledge workers. It&rsquo;s not a coincidence that in 2020, <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-g-suite-now-has-2-billion-users/#:~:text=Google's%20office%20productivity%20suite%2C%20G,users%20of%20products%20beyond%20Gmail." rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">over 2 billion</a> people are using Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides every month. That&rsquo;s 25% of the world population!</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">With Google Drive, we can easily shape our thoughts, by flexibly using bullets, free-text or tables. We love to organize our docs, slides and sheets in shared folders, so everyone can access them right away, without the need to &lsquo;request access&rsquo;. Best of all, when <a href="https://qatalog.com/integrate/google-drive/" rel="follow">Google Drive files we use often are linked to our Qatalog teams or projects</a>, it&rsquo;s dead easy for anyone in the company to locate them. And when information is that visible and flowy, you know that work works!&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Matteo Tittarelli, </span>Growth Operations</p>
<h3><strong>2. Dropbox Paper</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: center;">Dropbox Paper provides a real-time collaborative space for project creation and coordination. It has different use cases for different teams and includes templates for you to utilize depending on your project needs.&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Dropbox Paper is extremely useful for creators, as it has many applications and the ability to customize your document/media in any way you want. As a collaboration tool, it works similarly to Google Drive with invitations and sharable links.&nbsp;</p>
<h3><strong>3. Notion</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: center;">&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think that I&rsquo;d be able to keep up with all requested work and growth experiments without documenting it into Notion. Seeing my tickets and being able to organize different projects and where they&rsquo;ve progressed helps keep my team organized and efficient.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Kameron Tanseli, Growth Engineer</p>
<h3><strong>3. Slite</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: center;">The workplace for async teams. This documentation app is up-and-coming and provides helpful templates to ensure all your information is organized to perfection. Their "catch up" feature also provides a newsfeed of updates and new files.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>Benefits of documentation apps</h2>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Collaboration </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">&mdash; Documentation software allows for async collaboration across projects through comment features, sharing, and the actual work being done.&nbsp;</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Ownership</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &mdash; Editors can control access and decide who has permission to view, comment on, or edit a file. This allows for transparency within your team (or whoever you give access to).</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Discoverability </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">&mdash; Search features in documentation apps allow each document or project to be discoverable. These tools also make recent edits or changes easier to see.&nbsp;</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Documents in one place</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &mdash; Team members can access information regardless of location and time zone. All documentation is quickly and easily accessible.</span></li>
</ol>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Storing, sharing, and accessing files is crucial for keeping the wheels of your business well-oiled, but these apps don&rsquo;t always make it easy. For one, accessibility can create silos within specific teams if permissions aren&rsquo;t open. Here are some other challenges with documentation apps:</span></p>
<h2><b>3 challenges with documentation apps</b></h2>
<h3><b>1. Lack of a ready-to-use framework</b></h3>
<p>File storage apps don&rsquo;t offer a systematic process for naming or storing documents so that they are <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workplace-search-tools-vs-work-hub/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-documentation&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener">discoverable to everyone</a>, making document management difficult. If you&rsquo;re not the file creator, you&rsquo;ll often find yourself repeating questions like <i>&ldquo;where is that doc,&rdquo;</i> <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">&ldquo;what&rsquo;s the name of that doc,&rdquo;</span></i> or <i>&ldquo;can I have edit access?&rdquo;</i></p>
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<p>This becomes especially true across different generations of employees. When a person leaves, you inherit a Google Drive full of randomly named documents, and all the important documents that you need got lost who-knows-where, and you need to waste time recreating them.</p>
<h3><b>2. Docs are out of context</b></h3>
<p>Documents kept in your cloud storage app are often separated from their relevant team members, teams, or projects. Yes, you can look at who edited last &mdash; but that doesn&rsquo;t tell you who <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">owns</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that doc, or to which project or team.</span></p>
<p>When someone comes to look at a document for the first time, it&rsquo;s more difficult for them to understand it<i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i>Lack of context adds further complexity and challenges to the workday.&nbsp;</p>
<h3><b>3. Finding files is painful</b></h3>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With a lack of process for storing files into folders or categorizing them with the right names and context, it&rsquo;s difficult to search for and find a document when you need it.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>Yes, Google Drive search is good &mdash; but it doesn&rsquo;t include filters, and you might not always have the right keyword at hand if you&rsquo;re out of context. Even if you created or collaborated on a spreadsheet or slide deck, there&rsquo;s no guarantee you&rsquo;ll easily find it in a couple of weeks&rsquo; time.</p>
<p>Plus, you can&rsquo;t search for files outside of Google Drive from within Google Drive, and you aren&rsquo;t <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">always </span></i>uploading everything you do to the drive.<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-documentation&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener"> A work hub allows you to connect</a> all your search functions between documentation apps.&nbsp;</p>
<h2><b>Work hub vs. documentation apps</b></h2>
<p>So, what are the crucial differences between a Work Hub and a documentation app?</p>
<h3><b>1. Create and collaborate</b></h3>
<p>Pages and Posts allow for documentation that sits in context, relevant to each Project. Once published they appear in the Recent Activity feed of the Project, granting instant status updates at first glance.&nbsp;</p>
<p>However, documents aren&rsquo;t always created in Qatalog &mdash; instead, all the documents that you create or store within your different file-sharing tools are gathered together in one convenient place.&nbsp;</p>
<p>This allows for flexibility, so each team can keep using whichever tool is best for them whether that's Google Drive, Dropbox Paper, or another doc app &mdash; and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-documentation&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener">still benefit from collaborating</a> and accessing powerful knowledge together.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/VnZYkGL6TXy7NcSF36oS" alt="undefined" /></p>
<h3><strong>2. Link files to specific teams, projects, and people</strong></h3>
<p>Attach your documents, sheets, slides, or any other link to the <a href="https://qatalog.com/" rel="follow">relevant context in Qatalog</a>, so all information is tightly linked, easily retrievable, and transparent at every level of the organization.&nbsp;</p>
<p>No need to waste any more time creating workarounds such as docs listing various links, becoming a bookmarking pro, or keeping 10 tabs open on your browser.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/HJr8jmEQpu6iaQOiznHg" alt="undefined" /></p>
<h3><b>3. Full-text search for finding things quickly</b></h3>
<p>If you don&rsquo;t remember the title of a doc, you can still think of a keyword in the body text. Our search cuts across both Google Drive and Dropbox, both titles and full-text, to find any keyword in any doc.&nbsp;</p>
<p>You can also refine your search with powerful filters &mdash; by people, teams, projects, date, and more to further dig into the context of the doc.</p>
<h3><b>4. Keep track of doc activity from one place</b></h3>
<p>When you&rsquo;re waiting for a team member to comment or edit a doc, you might want to ping them more than once until they do, or just open the doc hoping that feedback magically appeared in there. Needless to say, this is a killer for your focus and productivity.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When you connect Google Drive or Dropbox to Qatalog, you can check a feed of what each team member did on any of these apps. You&rsquo;ll know if a member of the design team created a new slide deck on Google Drive, or if the head of growth edited a new doc on Dropbox &mdash; all in real-time.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So you stay on top of the activity in each and every document at any time, tracking who made what change, and when the edit occurred. Without pinging anyone.</span></p>
<h2>Add structure and transparency to your workplace with a work hub</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When you integrate your cloud documentation and storage apps with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow">a work hub in one virtual workspace</a>, all your files are always right there where you need them.</span></p>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Search for all your docs, slides, and sheets from one unified workspace</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">, without needing to switch between apps, rely on faulty search engines, or pinging anyone.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /><br /></span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Put all your docs into context</b> by tightly linking them with source, owner, teams, and projects, so you can find things quickly, and always get hold of a file in its latest version.<span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /><br /></span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Retain visibility on any file created by one of your teams</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">, without the need for an account on each tool (accessing or editing the file would still need an account).</span></li>
</ol>
<p>Boost team collaboration and bring people together in one workspace where they easily can find files, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-team-instant-messaging-apps-slack-teams/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-documentation&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener">messages</a>, project links, and goals. With this type of platform, you can unlock hidden productivity and keep remote/hybrid teams aligned.</p>

Documentation and productivity apps play a vital role in the workplace. Learn how a Work Hub connects your existing apps.

Work hub vs. Documentation apps | Qatalog

Documentation apps come with organization and context-switching challenges. Solve them with a work hub.

Best documentation software for modern teams

<p>Companies have a lot of information. Documents. Messages. Files. Decks. Code. Emails. If you keep digging, it goes on and on.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The chaos of information that happens in a company is limitless. This is why we developed tools to help us streamline and organize it.</p>
<p>Sharing information is vital for any company, yet how many of us have wasted time digging through old emails, switching between apps, browser tabs, and folders to find what we need?</p>
<p>In our research of more than 100 software companies, 77% said they have no process for documenting or storing information. According to<a href="https://qatalog.com/remote-work-report/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=remote-work-report&amp;utm_term=2021&amp;utm_content=report" rel="follow"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> GitLab&rsquo;s recent Remote Work Report</span></a>, only 37% of employees say their orgs do a good job of aligning work.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Company intranets</strong> have been traditionally used as platforms for corporate wikis, but in recent years have been replaced by solutions like a work hub.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s the thing: information overload is chaotic, and your workday shouldn't have to involve digging yourself out of a trench.</p>
<p>This is why many teams use corporate wikis such as <a href="http://notion.so/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Notion</span></a>, <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Confluence</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, or </span><a href="https://github.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">GitHub</a>&nbsp;to collaborate and spend less time hunting documents down. In this article, we&rsquo;ll explore how a work hub goes beyond team wikis by connecting with them to kill chaos.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>Top internal wiki software</h2>
<p><strong>1. Confluence</strong></p>
<p>Confluence is an Atlassian wiki software that enables project management and collaboration. <span style="font-weight: 400;">Confluence offers both cloud-based and on-premise deployment and allows employees to create project documents within the tool.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><strong>2. Slab</strong></p>
<p>Easily create, organize, and discover knowledge for your entire organization, from non-technical to tech-savvy.</p>
<p>Slab has a few interesting use cases but ultimately allows for teams to build a searchable knowledge base to return to time and time again.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>3. Notion</strong></p>
<p>With Notion, you have the tools to build a custom wiki. The benefit here is that you can customize your wiki solution using Notion&rsquo;s building blocks. You can easily attach project documents in a task, link employee benefits, and post company announcements.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>What are the challenges with company wikis?</h2>
<p>We spoke with 150+ teams and found out that company wikis are not without challenges that impact productivity and collaboration of teams, especially when remotely.</p>
<h3><strong>1. Information is hard to retrieve without context</strong></h3>
<p>Information needs to be accessible. If a slide deck that is part of a content marketing project gets shared to the company wiki without providing context, your teammates aren&rsquo;t getting the whole picture.</p>
<p>Let&rsquo;s say you hire someone whose focus is sales enablement. Without the context of that marketing presentation, how is this new hire supposed to see the big picture?&nbsp;</p>
<p>With a corporate wiki, your documents don&rsquo;t have generational value. Without a particular formatting process <span style="font-weight: 400;">&mdash;</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> which we&rsquo;ll get to </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">&mdash;</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that information gets lost in the chaos despite the work you put in initially.</span></p>
<h3><strong>2. There&rsquo;s no standard process</strong></h3>
<p>77% of people said they have no process for documenting or storing information.</p>
<p>This means that even though the adopter of the tool, or People and Ops teams, spend time thinking about how to structure a wiki &mdash; things can still get lost. Chaos is the constant, remember?&nbsp;</p>
<p>It becomes just one more thing to do. And adopting a company-wide wiki in a truly effective way takes a lot of time and consideration.&nbsp;</p>
<h3><strong>3. You don&rsquo;t have access to everything</strong><knowledge and="" access="" is="" scattered="" across="" teams="" it="" only="" takes="" 10="" minutes="" on="" your="" first="" day="" of="" work="" to="" run="" into="" the="" hiccup="" not="" having="" everything="" now="" sometimes="" this="" has="" do="" with="" tools="" limited="" seats="" but="" how="" many="" times="" have="" you="" a="" document="" had="" ask="" permission="" edit="" nbsp="" span=""></knowledge></h3>
<p><strong>Knowledge and access is scattered across teams. It only takes 10 minutes on your first day of work to run into the hiccup of not having access to everything. Now sometimes this has to do with tools having limited seats, but how many times have you run into a document you had to ask permission to edit? </strong></p>
<p>You need to bring it all together.</p>
<h3><strong>4. The ever-present boogie man of a silo&nbsp;</strong></h3>
<p>While more established teams of a company might use Confluence as their main wiki, younger, more cross-functional teams might start using Notion for its different capabilities and more intuitive UI.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Two different internal company wikis mean more to dig through once your company is ready to reconnect your teams and establish centralized communication.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>What&rsquo;s the difference between a Work Hub and a company wiki software?</h2>
<p>Working collaboratively across different teams and tools can result in a chaos of information, with knowledge distributed over email, chat threads, and cloud storage drives. Using a traditional system of files and folders makes it hard to find relevant information, especially as your team grows &mdash; and especially as different teams have different ways of documenting and storing information.</p>
<p>Company wikis organize information all in one place where everyone can access and contribute. It uses the power of internal links connecting knowledge &mdash; just like Wikipedia.&nbsp;</p>
<p>On GitHub, people share code and build software together. It&rsquo;s open-source, and a valuable team collaboration toolkit for engineers &mdash; but not so widespread to non-technical fields. Notion and Confluence are examples of company-wide knowledge bases that can be used by any team. They&rsquo;re helpful for creating a clear knowledge base of notes, processes, and company protocols.</p>
<p>With a Work Hub knowledge is gathered from various sources &mdash; company wikis, messaging apps, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/intranet-vs-work-hub/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-wiki&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">project management tools</a> &mdash; and centrally <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-digital-workspace/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-wiki&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">stored in one searchable workspace.</a> Your teams can access information across the whole organization, see the origin of each document, and understand the context. It provides total transparency and discoverability.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.buttercms.com/jjE2qXytQ6CiDeWMTJow" alt="Qatalog work hub - product wireframe" /></p>
<p>This idea of an interconnected workforce is essential when it comes to remote and hybrid work. Because employees are <a href="https://qatalog.com/remote-work-report/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=remote-work-report&amp;utm_term=2021&amp;utm_content=report" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">seemingly satisfied with remote work</a>, but feel the pain point of muddling through tools and uncertainty about what their colleagues are doing. As we move into the future of what work is supposed to look like, we can actively choose to eliminate the chaos of misplaced, disorganized, constant information.</p>
<h2>Why you need a Work Hub to live with your wiki</h2>
<p>When creating a unified workspace for your team, you need a platform that connects information intuitively, making your current apps work smarter &mdash; enabling you to compound knowledge without disrupting your existing processes.&nbsp;</p>
<p>A work hub integrates what you&rsquo;re already using in order to unlock hidden potential &mdash; and without you having to start from scratch.&nbsp;</p>
<p>When you connect Confluence and GitHub to a work hub, you can:</p>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><strong>Use our custom-built, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workplace-search-tools-vs-work-hub/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-wiki&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">full-text search</a> to find any file quickly across all of these tools. </strong>Based on your license and access permissions, you will be able to view anything created in these tools through a work hub, but you&rsquo;ll need a license to read, comment and edit.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Track the activity feed of each team member across any connected wiki in real-time.</strong> For example, a marketer will be able to see if and when a developer pushes a commit for a specific feature to GitHub, even without having a license for it.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Get a ready and solid framework for teams, projects, and workflows that gets automatically updated.</strong> If you want ready-to-use and scalable spaces for every person, team, project <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/intranet-vs-work-hub/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=work-hub-wiki&amp;utm_content=post" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">or internal workflow,</a> we&rsquo;ve built them&mdash;and they&rsquo;re all tightly linked and nested together. So you won&rsquo;t have to worry about creating a template, uniforming inconsistencies, or recreating lost information&mdash;because if someone leaves, all their projects, updates, and workflows get automatically passed to their team lead.</span></li>
</ol>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Qatalog's Company Section includes a <span>customizable Company page where admins can create and add wiki pages such as the vacation policy or onboarding guides. Admins can also post company-wide updates, and upload important resources or link processes through Workflows.&nbsp;</span></span>So whether you&rsquo;re refreshing your hiring process, reporting on user metrics, or chasing that all-hands note, you&rsquo;ll get more value from knowledge when you don&rsquo;t waste hours searching for it.</p>

Company wikis are used to share information throughout a company. A work hub does the same thing, while integrating other useful tools.

Company wiki vs work hub | Qatalog blog

Companies have a lot of information. Documents. Messages. Files. Decks. Code. Emails. If you keep digging, it goes on and on.

Deciding between a company wiki and a connected Work Hub

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Two minutes. </span>It&rsquo;s just four steps to get started. Set up your account and profile, share it with your coworkers, and connect your tools in one click.</p>

How long do I need to set up a Qatalog work hub?

<p>Qatalog consolidates information from across all your tools. And makes it accessible to everyone through search, profiles and projects. It's the connective tissue that makes all your tools work together.</p>

I want to consolidate our tools, not add more. How does Qatalog help?

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It&rsquo;s as simple as sending folks a link. Anyone can sign up in a few clicks.</span></p>

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