Teamwork needs work. Flowdock attempts to minimize the amount of that work. The promise is: Keep your team up-to-date with no effort.

That means Flowdock reduces the need for meetings. In a good team, members know what the others are doing at all times. A good team does not constantly feel the need to have meetings.

When done right, an efficient meeting can be useful. There are a couple of things in specific that are required for a good meeting. Flowdock can give you them.

The Agenda

With Flowdock, you can collect the agenda just like you collect any list on Flowdock. We use the #agenda tag to gather things we need to go through during our weekly “administrative” meeting. Just like I showed you in my last post about handling todo lists in Flowdock, the lists form naturally from the path of the conversation.

Flowser gives us the complete agenda. We just tick out the #agenda tag off the items as we go through them.

On meeting day, there are rarely many additions or other surprises from attendees who “haven’t seen the agenda”, since on any given moment

• anybody can contribute to the agenda
• the agenda is right there for everyone to see

Track and stay organized

The second most important thing in a great meeting is efficient tracking of action points (or todos) and when needed, separate note taking.

We track todos the same way in and outside of meetings. We often go through the todos in these meetings to make sure they are progressing and to address any potential problems.

We don’t keep separate notes about these meetings. We keep notes all the time by tagging things in Flowdock. A meeting isn’t a special opportunity to be organized for a half an hour. With Flowdock, staying organized all the time is as easy as chat.

Public beta opens tomorrow!

Flowdock is a real-time collaboration web app directed to teams. It allows co-workers to work together closely and coexist in the same space within their browser. Right now it’s going through an alpha stage where some 10 companies are trying it out and giving feedback.

The public beta is to be expected later this year. Before that we want to share some of the ways of using Flowdock with you. Today I’ll show you some ways to use one of the coolest features in Flowdock, tagging.

Lowering the barrier

We’ve noticed that lots of useful content is generated in instant Messaging, e-mail, Twitter and other medias. In a couple of minutes it may be totally forgotten, because it’s in no-one’s interest to structure that data to a wiki page, or even worse, to a Word document.

Imagine if logging a simple bug would mean just writing a short description to your group chat and ending the line with a #bug hashtag? With Flowdock’s team chat, that’s exactly how it works.

Tags can be added as hashtags or afterwards with a separate UI by anyone in your team. This helps you to ensure that all relevant content is tagged properly.

Information always accessible

All tagged content, including chat, files, content from e-mails etc. can be found using Flowser, an app-in-app of Flowdock for information management. When a bug is closed, for example, the user can simply remove the #bug tag.

When I’m looking for a screenshot of Flowdock for a blog post, I’m going to open Flowser and search for #screenshot. If I wanted to find screenshots only about our future promo site, I could just search for #screenshot #promo.

All this has truly changed our way of working. Now I’ll never forget who’s managing contracts at one of our customers, because that information is tagged in our flow. And tagging that information didn’t cost me anything.