Group Productivity On The Web

I’ve been working to narrow down the array of possibilities for productivity apps at Circle Six Design. I’ve been looking for solutions that are accessible by both employees and clients, inexpensive and easy to use. Out of the array of possibilities, here’s my current list…

Home Base

As I’ve mentioned previously, we love Zoho Projects. For the purposes of this post, I’ll highlight two major sections of its impressive feature list, the internal and external views.

Internally, I can create a project for a given client, assign the necessary employees and freelancers, and then create meetings, task lists (with individual tasks assigned to project members as necessary) and upload project files with a versioning system. There’s also time tracking, which no project should be without ;).

Externally, I can give a client access to the page and they can view task lists that I mark as “external”, and even add milestones and tasks to the external list. There’s a forum that’s accessible to all of us, and we can create threaded conversations that are available to all persons assigned to the project. This avoids the mess of communication that evolves around carbon copied emails and phone conversations. What I would like to see is a wiki/whiteboard with the ability to link to project documents/images. In fact, I’d like to see better integration between all of the Zoho apps. Zoho provides a great wiki app, but it requires a separate login and that’s a lot to ask of a client.

My wish list aside, Zoho Project’s low cost-of-entry and ability to share with clients make it a great home base for a small agency like mine. When necessary, I can combine with other tools…

Extended Collaboration

Backpack has always provided a great way to share a simple page of ideas with a client. It includes whiteboards, which makes working on copy ideas and collaboration a breeze. I can upload mockups, font ideas, notes and documents for review. I can create timelines and project overviews. It’s my backup to a full Zoho Project. And it has an API, which means I can use tools like the TextMate Backpack Bundle or PackRat to manage the page.

The previously mentioned Zoho Wiki is an easy to use wiki. Any wiki makes a great collaboration tool. I picked Zoho because I was already using their services in several other areas and their wiki was an easy-to-set-up and well-developed tool.

Mindmeister has turned out to be an excellent tool. It’s still in Private Beta, I think, but I’ve been able to invite people to share and collaborate on mind maps whenever I need to. This takes brainstorming to a new level. It even works wonders if you’re in the same room. Seriously. And Mindmeister allows for live collaboration, so you see each other’s changes and additions in realtime.

Meetings and Calendars

The Zoho Projects calendar and the Gantt charts that complement it are great tools for overviews. They lack subscriptions and an API, however, which makes 30 Boxes a better alternative for scheduling our office life. With onebox, I can quickly add an event to our 30 Boxes calendar and have it show up on everyone’s iCal. I’m currently causing mass confusion at the office with my indecision as to how to consolidate our meeting scheduling and I wish that Zoho would just add subscriptions and an API to their app. It’s great to be able to add meetings to individual projects and send reminders via email to just the people involved in that project. But it’s also great for everyone in the office to know who’s doing what, and when (30 Boxes). When I get that mess figured out, I’ll post my solution.

When it comes to client meetings, we often meet with boards. This means we have to work around five or more busy client’s schedules, and at least two of our own. Doodle makes life easier for everyone. You just add a poll and your available dates and let people “vote” on what works for them. Usually a consensus is reached and a meeting can be scheduled.

Others

Pownce is looking like it’s going to be an awesome tool for inter-office communication. With the ability to send messages quickly to groups or individuals, a cross-platform desktop app, the promise of an API, and the ability to send links and files, it’s the perfect tool for office communication.

I love IM for working with clients long distance. I use Adium for chatting across most of the messaging protocols. Skype is also a great tool for long distance collaboration.

In Closing

Obviously, if you can afford it, Basecamp can handle a lot of this. It’s a little beyond our monthly budget at this point. I would love to have all of the features of Basecamp and have them in one place, but the money is better spent elsewhere at this point. And some of these individual tools can do a better job of their specific tasks than any of the all-in-one solutions.

I’m constantly trying to narrow down our use of web apps to as few as possible. I cause a lot of problems around the office every time I get everyone to sign up for a new service and then switch again the next week. And it’s really too much to ask of a client to have three separate logins to track one project. So consolidation is a long-term goal, as is cost-effectiveness. This is only the current state of things and is obviously in constant flux, as is the state of productivity applications on the web. We’ll see what happens next.

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