Snippets

Snippets is a jabber/xmpp bot that periodically asks each team member what are you doing? and collects the answers on a web page. It's based on a google-internal tool I don't know much about. The name and purpose are the same, everyhing else is either different or coincidentically identical.

This snippets tool is drastically simple. There's no access control and hardly any configuration.

Each user adds the snippets bot's JID as a contact. Snippets notices that, and starts asking what's up now and then. It tries to adapt the timing of its questions to each user's working habits.

There are two commands, namely help and invite user@domain. Everything else said to snippets is added to its log. The log is visible on the web, and snippets will tell you where.

(Google Apps users usually need to fix their domain first of all.)

To install snippets, you have to download it from github, read the README, install various CPAN modules, create one SQL table and an XMPP account, then make sure the snippets process runs at all times. Very simple, really.