GoLinks, also known as go/links, golinks, or go-links, can help anyone in a company find what they’re looking for quickly. Before we discuss these internal short links, let’s examine the problem.
Coveo discovered that employees spend an average of 3.6 hours per day searching for information needed for their jobs. That’s a lot of time.
We have lots of productivity tools at work now. We use tools such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, chat channels, digital asset management systems, and Google Drive. However, not everyone uses them correctly. Important things are spread all over the place.To combat the confusion, there are these little things called go links…
What are go links?
Go links are easy-to-remember internal short links used within a company. They can help anyone in the company find any resource, guideline, tool, project board, or other item they’re looking for.
Moving past that go links definition to gain a bit more clarity, let’s look at some short URLs you’re already familiar with: external short links!
You’ve probably used Bit.ly or another URL-shortening service to help you share a link on your social network like Twitter, right?Well, go links are sort of similar, except that long URL gets transformed into short human-readable links that people within a company can easily remember, use, and share.
Go links only work for users within your organization. Any company could have the same go links, but they would go to different URLs.
For example, go/sales might redirect to Pipedrive at one company, while for another company it redirects to SalesForce. Only people within your organization can access these go links. Users first need to authenticate with SSO or their email before the go link will redirect.
Who uses go links?
Any company can benefit from using the GoLinks link shortener. It not only helps companies share resources with each other but also makes finding and navigating to web pages lightning-fast.
Here are some internal short link use cases:
Company-wide sharing
Let’s say you have a free lunch on the first Friday of every month. You might make a go link called go/lunch to direct to the Typeform where people can select their menu item or state any dietary restrictions. Before you send a reminder, many employees will already have remembered the link and placed their order.
Department-wide sharing
Each department or team will have resources they need to share with each other. For example, go/guidelines would be a quick and easy way for your content team to recall the brand and style guidelines.
Project speed
Is your team working on a big project? Maybe that Jira board or task list deserves its own go link. Or you could make a few different go links for the important in-progress assets. Go/jira, go/sprint, go/backlog are all examples of popular Jira go links.
Approved tool usage
If you have an approved business travel tool that helps you consolidate and track all business travel in one place, you could set up go/travel to automatically redirect employees to where they’re supposed to make their ticket purchases and go/expenses for where they submit their expense reports.
Wiki improvements
Are you tired of endlessly jumping in and out of nested wiki folders and still not finding what you need? Create go links that target specific pages so that your engineering team can find engineering-specific info and your sales team can find sales-specific info.
Tool and resource management
Setting up go links for your top tools can also help you see which tools everyone is using and which ones are getting left behind. You can discover duplicates and get a real handle on the situation.
Usage monitoring
When you use our application GoLinks, you get reports on monthly, weekly, and daily usage so you can see if tools and resources are being utilized the way you would expect.
Here are just a few of the applications and use cases for common departments:
- Development: Access and share code sources, issues, backlogs, and tools
- Marketing: Access and share assets, guidelines, tools, and projects
- Sales: Access and share assets, tools, and top accounts
- Office: Manage and curate company-wide resources to reduce repetitive questions
- HR: Manage and curate company-wide resources to improve employee experience and the usage of approved tools
- Customer Success: Access and share tools, priority tickets, customer accounts, and response guidelines
- Finance: Access and share resources and tools, also manage and curate various company guidelines, such as the reimbursement process
Here’s a quick overview of how to create internal short links with GoLinks:
What companies use go links?
We won’t get into the full history of go links, but long story short, they were first developed and released by an IT engineer at NCSU in 2010. Simultaneously, Benjamin Staffin at Google developed something similar, so that Googlers could find whatever they were looking for fast.
They used intuitive and simple words following go/ to reach any resource with just a few keystrokes.
Go links are used by large enterprises like Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Netflix. Today, they are gaining popularity among tech companies of any size and in industries outside of tech.
Who can use my go links?
Anyone in your organization can use the go links that anyone on your team creates. Users have to authenticate to use GoLinks through SSO or email sign-in.
If the destination of the golink requires additional permissions to access, eg. a protected doc, the user will have to further authenticate. A go link is simply a redirect, so if someone on your company doesn’t have access to whatever the final destination URL is, then they won’t be able to view it.
For example, if go/dev links to a private engineering board in Jira, your marketing team won’t be able to see it because they don’t have permission from Jira.
Similarly, if go/guidelines links to your brand guidelines in a Google Doc, then anyone outside of your content team likely won’t have the Google Doc permission to edit it, but they will be able to view it.
Should my company use internal short links?
If you want to increase your productivity and speed of collaboration, then yes! GoLinks can make a large impact.
FAQs
What is an example of a shortened link?
An example of a shortened link is go/presentation. These links condense lengthy URLs into a simpler, more manageable format that is easier to share and remember.
How to get a shorter URL?
To get a shorter URL, you can use a URL shortening service such as GoLinks, Bitly, TinyURL, or Google’s URL Shortener. By pasting your long URL into one of these services, you will receive a shortened version that is easy to share.
What are short links called?
Short links are commonly referred to as shortened URLs, short URLs, or go links. They are also known as URL shorteners or link shorteners due to the services that create them.
Why do people use short links?
People use short links to make URLs easier to share, especially on platforms like Twitter where character limits are strict. Additionally, short links help track clicks, gather detailed analytics, and simplify internal links for easier access to resources within an organization or website.
What is the tool to make links shorter?
The tool to make links shorter is called a URL shortener. Some of the most popular URL shorteners include GoLinks, Bitly, TinyURL, and Rebrandly, which provide easy-to-use interfaces for creating short links.
