Tools and Services at your disposal (Slack, Flow, Overleaf, LinkedIn Learning)
Hey, everybody! Happy Friday!
I wanted to announce a couple of new services that are available to you, as well as remind you of some you may not know about. Let’s get right to it.
== Slack ==
First up, we’ve got Slack! Slack (https://www.slack.com) is a collaboration and chat tool that many people have been using for years. We’ve now got a paid instance in CELS we’re making available to you, as well as offering the opportunity to convert some free instances to paid instances under our billing umbrella if that’s a better fit for you.
Why would you want to use Slack instead of, say, Jabber? Well, first and foremost, it’s available across platforms. You can use it in any browser, or a dedicated app on your phone, or a dedicated app on your computer — pretty much everywhere you’d want it. It has unlimited chat history, private messaging, group messaging, attachments, third party integrations, and lots more bells and whistles. Also, unlike jabber, it’s not limited to only Argonne accounts. Any collaborators can join with an invitation.
The fine folks at Slack have plenty of documentation on how to use it, so I’m going to point you at our docs on the specifics for what we’re doing. Check out https://www.cels-anl.gov/slack for our documentation, which also includes the link on how to join, and to Slack’s general documentation. You don’t need an invite, anyone with an anl.gov address can join.
(If you’re wondering why we don’t use Microsoft Teams, it’s the same issue – it’s only accessible to those inside Argonne and can’t be used to collaborate with outsiders.)
Please join and explore. In the coming weeks we’ll offer some show and tell sessions to show off the capabilities.
== Flow ==
Part of our Office 365 subscription includes the tool Flow which lets you set up automated tasks involving the Office 365 suite. One of the more common requests I’ve seen is “How do I convince my neighbor that I’m not an alien trying to steal his brain?” But second to that is “How do I send an e-mail on an automated schedule?”
I can’t help you with the first (trust me, I’ve tried), but Flow can handle the second. We’ve documented the process here:
https://virtualhelpdesk.cels.anl.gov/docs/tips-and-tricks/mail-calendar/#sending-a-regular-recurring-e-mail
There’s plenty of other tasks you can do with this service, so please explore and try it out!
== Overleaf ==
CELS Shared Services offers subscriptions to Overleaf, collaborative LaTeX editing. Signing up is easy, just send us a note to [email protected] and let us know you want access. If you’re not a CELS employee, we’ll need a project code. Check out the docs here:
https://virtualhelpdesk.cels.anl.gov/docs/service-catalog/developer-and-collaboration-tools-and-services/overleaf/
== LinkedIn Learning ==
Just a reminder we’re offering video training courses from LinkedIn Learning. They’ve got an extensive catalog of training material, and it’s accessible to all CELS users. Documentation and the link to request access can be found at https://virtualhelpdesk.cels.anl.gov/docs/service-catalog/linkedin-learning/.
Thanks, and have a great weekend!