All Narrative employees will be issued a Mac laptop. For security, Narrative employees should ensure that the following settings are active if they are not already:
We use Google’s suite of business applications for much of our productivity. You should have received your account credentials in your welcome packet.
Google Mail is our email provider. You actually have quite a few options for how you use it. The most common is by just going to mail.narrative.io and using their traditional web interface. Google has also released a new web interface and mobile app called Google Inbox that helps you get to the ultra-desirable “Inbox Zero.” If you’re an Outlook person you can always request a license for that (see Microsoft Office below).
Storage and backups, as simple as they sound, are incredibly hard to do well. So like with many things we just let Google do it. As part of your account you will have access to Google Drive and we strongly suggest you store any important files there if you don’t have them stored elsewhere (Github, etc.) We are also working on having a shared Google Drive repository for company wide documents. You get get to Drive by going to drive.narrative.io.
Developers on Mac OS can also install the Google drive integration via:
brew install --cask google-drive-file-stream
Our primary office suite is Google Docs. They have products that are acceptable replacements for Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. While some products are not as feature rich as their Microsoft alternative they do have the distinct advantage of being much easier to collaborate with (having multiple users edit a presentation at the same time is how we know we live in the future). You can create documents directly from Google Drive.
Google Groups is the product we use to manage our mailing lists. While it is a tool that distributes emails to people it also creates a repository of all of those emails that is searchable. As mentioned above we are evaluating creating an Email Transparency process and Google Groups would be a likely solution.
Slack is a real-time communication platform that allows everyone at the company to communicate with each other. We encourage everyone in the company to use Slack as it helps us achieve our core value of transparency with communication being saved and searchable by anyone in the company. While you can do private messages within Slack we really encourage people to have conversation in channels that can be seen by the entire organization. You can go here to download the Slack client and you should have already received an email with your account details.
Developers on Mac OS can also install slack via:
brew install --cask slack
Github is the code repository we use for all Narrative developed software. More than that we also use Github to host and discuss the employee handbook (you are likely reading this in Github right hit second). While most organizations only have engineers and product folks using Github we would like everyone in the organization, even non-technical users, to be comfortable in Github. You should have received an account e-mail if you didn’t already have an account.
Conference calls. They happen. If you’re going to be the one doing the hosting you’re going to need a conference line and Google Meet has your back. Meet comes as part of GSuite and requires no installation. A meet can be added to any calendar invite and will allow for both video conferencing and with automatically include a dial-in for participants.
Sometimes Google Docs just don’t get the job done. If you’re an Excel power user or if creating PowerPoints is what gets you out of bed in the morning we know that you’ll want to get your hands on Office. If you would like an Office license please contact the Helpdesk (helpdesk@narrative.io) and we will get you a license. Please keep in mind that each license costs the company money so only request it if you need it to do your job.
Security is our top priority and having everyone in the organization use best practices around passwords including eliminating reuse and making passwords strong against a variety of attacks is key. The use of a password manager makes these goals achievable. We recommend OnePassword for its feature set, ease of use, cross platform support, and commitment to security. You can download it here.