SeaTable

I would highly recommend SeaTable to any young enterprise: When you start out in business, you do not yet know what you need. SeaTable offers everything you need (and more), growing with you as your organisation grows. The free plan allows you to build your system. You can’t lose by giving it a try. In the free version, you get nearly complete functionality. - You can take your time and set up a first draft of your data management system. (Airtable, for example, will not give you access to their Extensions on the free plan. In SeaTable you have full access to them from the word “go”.) Your set-up will change and improve as you get to know all of the features and add in automations. There certainly is a learning curve, but for a beginners’ needs, I would class it as “completely manageable”. Documentation is available, and customer service is excellent. There is also a forum where users communicate with each other.

I will give you a detailed description here, of how SeaTable has worked for our organisation. - If you have any questions on functionality you can reply to this comment, and I will get back to you.

Two years ago, I found myself looking for a GDPR compliant solution for managing the data of our non-profit educational start-up. Before that, I had already used and built several no-code systems to manage our data (Excel, Trello, Smartsheet, Airtable, and the whole Google environment). SeaTable has served us well.

Organising your information: With the help of SeaTable, you can organise complex information in various visually appealing ways. At first glance, it follows the traditional spreadsheet format: Each piece of data (by which I mean the additional data that is related to each record) is initially displayed in a column. There are 25 column types available, laying good foundations for correct data entry by the whole team. The complexity of the information stored in each base can be managed by adding multi-level filters, grouping, sorting and selective hiding of columns plus colour coding.

File Management is handled especially well, in SeaTable. There is no room, here, to go into the many advantages I see in using SeaTable to handle your files, but I will mention the main one: Treating a file as a record in a base allows you to add metadata into the base (description, tags, names, dates). - This will not take much additional time, and can be handled elegantly with the use of a form. It can even be automated, of course. - With that set-up, you create a highly functional and adaptive file library. You can filter by any attributes you wish, and present only relevant lists of files to any one role in your organisation.

The longer you work with SeaTable, the more uses you will find for it, in your business. SeaTable will gradually turn into a substitute for many of the tools you are already using. --- Examples: - Forms (All businesses need forms to collect information in a structured way. I have worked with GravityForms for many years, and have a high level of expectations in that area. SeaTable’s Form options are quite comparable, offering all the necessary options of adding conditionality, formatting, help text, default values, access permissions, notifications, optional deadline for submission, and much more.) - “Kanban” (Many small businesses start out with Trello and you will find your beloved Kanban view right there, in SeaTable.) - “Page Design” (Once you start with that, you will find more and more uses. A simple first use for a start-up would be the issuing of invoices based on data in your table. Also, product descriptions, proposals, reports and workflow descriptions or SOP’s.) - “Gallery” (Similar to Kanban. In contrast to Page Design, it can be deployed more readily to present product information (or social media content planning), both to your team and to customers. Especially useful when a picture of a product (or person) is to be featured prominently. - For presenting information about files, choose Kanban instead. - Other useful plugins (which impact the display of the information your bases hold) are: “Timeline”, “Calendar”, “Map”, “Deduplication” and “SQL Query”. —

Project Management: I have used Monday.com, JIRA and Trello for project management in the past. With SeaTable, I feel that I am able to achieve a more user-friendly custom set-up for my team. (Just because something is specifically built for project management does not mean that it is better for project management!) Communication is a key feature of project management. SeaTable provides you with the topic-specific communication tool you need. Each record has a comment function. With the help of "timeline" or "calendar" view, you can manage scheduling. The addition of various fields/columns that you can later filter by (such as “completion status”, “urgency”,”priority”, “assigned to”) allows for easy monitoring of your projects.

Non-code-savvy users (like myself!) will, over time, discover delightful additional features. With SeaTable, you are truly empowered to build highly customised semi-automated workflows, and you can do that even on the Free Plan. Data processing operations can be added in various no-code ways, and can be set to deploy based on rules (or, even, on the push of a virtual button!). All this is really easy to build, right there in the base building interface which will “walk you through the process”.

It is also possible to connect to one of the custom workflow builders like Make (formerly Integromat) or Zapier, if you are familiar with those. - JavaScript and Python can be added directly or via import. These connection options are available in the Free and Plus subscription. - Check out the Enterprise subscription for the additional offering of built-in SeaTable automations.

SeaTable is a growth-oriented and highly customisable solution for data and file management. The fact that it is also more than suitable for project management makes it an ideal option, in my book, especially for young enterprises.

As you are in charge of the set-up, you can build it to fit the existing company culture.

Don’t make your team work for a system. - Make a system work for you and for your team.