News of a possible H1N1 virus, or “Swine Flu,” pandemic is causing many commercial firms and government agencies to examine their Continuity of Operations (COOP) plans so business can soldier on during the crisis. The threat of an H1N1 outbreak is even prompting the United States Centers for Disease Control to recommend that small businesses have telework and business continuity plans in place.

This could place even organizations with well developed telecommuting programs in a challenging position, because a major virus outbreak may mean that their remote worker needs exceed their current capacity.

On the flip side, there are organizations that are far from telecommuting-friendly, which face even more challenges because they aren’t set up for remote working. In order to keep their business running in such a crisis they are going to need to buy or build an infrastructure to meet a new model of working.

At WebWorkerDaily, we get a chance to review some of the best office productivity, social media, online collaboration, project management, and Web 2.0 tools that in a worst case scenario — like a pandemic outbreak — can help an organization maintain some semblance of operations and communications, even though its employees and contractors are working from home during the crisis.

Perhaps your organization already has a well-honed telecommuting policy, however it is prudent to look for chinks in your telecommuting plans before the worst case scenario happens. Here is a look at some tools and services you can use to keep business operations running.

Office Suites
While Microsoft Office is probably your corporate standard, an extreme scenario like a pandemic outbreak could place your newly minted web workers on their home PCs or on a limited number of organization owned notebook PCs — there might not be enough Office licenses to cope with this scenario. This means you may need to consider web office solutions to make up the shortfall. Good choices include:

• Google Apps is a good choice for augmenting your corporate standard Office suite, even though it is not as feature-rich. There are fee-based and free versions available.

• Zoho Business is another ready solution, with a wider variety of applications that Google Apps.

• Simon and I recently covered the impending rollout of  Office Web Apps. While it isn’t available yet, the model it promises is ideal for a scenario like this, because it can offer users remote access to their important Microsoft Office files with a familiar interface.

Web office suites can help you keep your work accessible online, which is especially handy if all your workers don’t have remote access to your corporate network.

Social Media
Whether or not your organization has embraced social media behind the firewall, suddenly becoming a home-based organization means that employees are largely cut off from each other. Social networking tools can help them stay in touch with each other and the organization as a whole.

Some corporate-grade social media tools that might fit the bill include:

• Socialtext, a corporate social networking and collaboration tool that we’ve covered previously.
• Yammer, a Twitter clone, is another option for injecting social media into your organizational communications (see our previous coverage).

Each solution has fee-based and free versions.

Project Management

Putting your project management tools online is a prudent move, even before a crisis — but it could become a necessity in light of maintaining corporate operations in the midst of an H1N1 outbreak. However, Microsoft Project maintains its crown as the most popular — albeit mostly desktop-bound — corporate project management solution. Here are some good online project management tools:

• Basecamp is a the most well-known of all of the online PM tools  — we’ve written about it many times previously.
• Zoho Projects is an economical and innovative project management solution that Doriano previously covered for WWD.
• Charles reviewed Team Effect which garnered some mixed comments but is worthy a trial.
• PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) is another online project management option and according to Simon’s review it is definitely worth considering

Each of these solutions have fee-based and free versions.

Instant Messaging
Keeping your team in touch with each other even if they are all stuck at home is vital. If your organization isn’t already using instant messaging, then you need to consider it as part of your contingency plan.

Some instant messaging solutions you should consider include:

• Open source clients like Pidgin and Adium which let you encrypt chat sessions over commercial IM networks including AIM, GTalk, Windows Live, and Yahoo.
• Microsoft Office Communications Server also offers web-based access to its IM client. If your organization is running it, take steps to ensure your staff has access to it from home.

Web Conferencing & Collaboration
Today’s web conferencing and collaboration tools are ideal for keeping your team working together even though they’re not all working from the same office. Here are some options for web conferencing:

• Acrobat.com includes ConnectNow. Thursday covered Acrobat.com coming out of beta. It has free and fee-based versions and includes online collaboration features.
• Dimdim, which we’ve covered before, is an excellent low-cost teleconferencing tool
• Simon covered the beta launch of Team Apart, a free online collaboration tool that offers white board, video conferencing, and file sharing. Depending on the progress of the beta, it might be worth considering.

Crises and Web Working
Whether you are building out or just augmenting your communications infrastructure in light of the H1N1 threat, I recommend checking out these  applications now and not on the eve of a crisis. You should also make sure that employees know how to use these applications and how to access them well in advance of having to actually implement your crisis plan..

How is your organization preparing to continue operations during an H1N1 virus outbreak?

Image by mzacha from stock.xchng.

Team Effect jokingly calls its competition the “the vast swathe of online task lists…and Basecamp clones” that make up the current market for project management solutions. The claim is that, unlike its competitors, Team Effect is “fun to use.” I won’t go that far, but the Team Effect web interface and interactive Gantt-style calendar — the main selling point of the app — are visually appealing and relatively easy to use.

Like many similar products, upon login, users are taken to a dashboard where they can see an overview of activity for projects with which they are associated. The “Comments and Messages” area is laid out in a Twitter-like fashion, and users can see more detail, or respond, by clicking an existing message. Oddly, it appears that one needs to go to a different screen to compose a new message.

Other features, such as schedules and tasks, should be appealing to those who prefer visual representations of project plans. Schedules can be changed by dragging the bars in the Gantt-style calendars (which Team Effect has implemented without Flash, thankfully). Team Effect includes some sophisticated reports that web workers should find useful, such as project status and schedules.

The documentation is OK, as far as it goes, but appears to be incomplete. I wasn’t able to find information on whether the product notifies users of changes by email, or whether it has any tools such as RSS feeds that would keep people up-to-date without logging into the web site constantly. Additionally, the web site times out after a fairly short period of inactivity. The system does allow you to export some data to Excel, and this ability is apparently being expanded.

Team Effect is priced depending on the number of users you need. It offers a 30-day free trial, after which the basic package is $15 per month for five users. Other packages are available, all at the same rate of $3 per login per month. For most packages, the fee is only charged if a user actually logs in. All packages include unlimited projects and storage. Team Effect also offers discounts or free service to nonprofit organizations.

Team Effect will appeal to those who like visual representations of their workflow. But people working on projects that change frequently may find logging into the Team Effect web site several times a day to be a hassle.

Have you used Team Effect? How do you manage projects?

At first peek, web app Teambox looks like another collaboration tool: it’s a Basecamp rival that facilitates collaboration and notifies team members of additions and changes to your projects. Both come with a simple, user-friendly interface. But Teambox has one bonus; it lets teams create unlimited projects for free. Teambox charges for branding, installing it on your own server and subscribing to maintenance plans.

The dashboard has details of all your current projects. Every project consists of messages (discussion forum), lists (tasks), pages (wiki), people (contacts on the project) and chat. In less than 10 minutes, I created two projects and added content for each.

Teambox feels easier and more intuitive than Basecamp. Not once did I need to peek at the help file or the Textile (text formatting) reference; the tips on the page were enough. Even after using Basecamp for a while, I still needed to look up its Textile reference.

Basecamp’s interface is nicer than Teambox’s, though; it’s sleeker and more eye-pleasing, with a dash of color. By contrast, Teambox’s interface contains little color and it doesn’t look the same in all browsers. For example, it uses a serif font in Google Chrome, making it a harder read than the sans-serif font displayed in Firefox. The project dashboard formatting could stand some improvement, too.

Web workers, especially those working solo, might prefer Teambox just because it’s free. You can freely create a project for every client and add those clients to the projects. However, if you need to build a complete extranet, complete with branding (which you have to pay for with Teambox), Basecamp is still the collaboration tool of choice. Furthermore, Basecamp has been around longer and has third party apps that work it. I’m sure Teambox will add new features as it develops a following and continues to grow.

You need to determine your own needs and chose the applications that best meets those needs. For a freelancer like me, Teambox fits my bill if I need to collaborate and manage projects with clients.

What team collaboration app do you use?

Zoho has released a major update to Zoho Projects, its online project management system that allows you to share projects with your team via the web. Zoho Projects 2.0 could be a tempting service for small- to medium-sized organizations that cannot afford Microsoft Project, the “gold standard” for project management in the enterprise. Zoho Projects requires no special software, just a browser and an Internet connection.

Several plans are available, including a free account that enables you to manage one project. That free account has unlimited users, which is a great way to get your feet wet. Create an account, invite all your team members, and give Zoho Projects a test drive before splashing out on one of the beefier plans. The good news is that you can now also import Microsoft Project files, which means you don’t have to recreate everything from scratch for an active project.

Features

There are many new features for Zoho Projects 2.0, such as a revamped and less-cluttered dashboard and a Twitter-like user status update service that lets people involved in a project know what everyone is doing. There are also wikis and live group chatting, which give team members the ability to communicate online in real time.

A useful feature is a centralized file-sharing system for storing project documentation with folders, tagging, search and versioning. Files can be Microsoft Office documents or Zoho Office documents, which is now integrated with Zoho Projects.

The Timesheet feature allows you to log and track time spent by individuals or groups on specific tasks. Zoho has also integrated Zoho Invoice, which can assist with creating and tracking invoices for the project.

Zoho Projects vs. Basecamp

The biggest competitor for Zoho Projects isn’t Microsoft Project, but actually 37Signals’ popular Basecamp project management system. Some will prefer the slicker user interface of Basecamp over Zoho’s simplistic UI, while others will prefer the much lower cost for Zoho plans. For example, it’s $149/month for a Basecamp unlimited projects plan compared with $80/month for Zoho Projects. However, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison because Basecamp offers 50 GB of file storage vs. Zoho’s 25 GB.

Both services offer free plans for one project with unlimited users, but Zoho’s free plan includes many more bells and whistles such as SSL support, 100 MB file storage, time tracking and more. However, you can try any of Basecamp’s plans for 30 days with all of its features enabled.

As for performance, both solutions are perky over a DSL connection. The true test will be accessing a massive project with a large amount of users hitting it at the same time. Which one will scale better? If you take into consideration the client base for each solution, then Basecamp will probably have the edge.

Each service provides the basics for project management such as milestones, to-do lists, live chat, file sharing/management, time management, calendaring, Gantt Charts and wikis. Zoho does provide the unique option to integrate documents from its Zoho office suites of applications, including Zoho Invoice.

Conclusion

If your organization is looking for a quick and easy and affordable solution for implementing an online project management system that works with an online office suite of applications, then Zoho Projects could be just what you’re looking for. The only way to know for sure is to get your hands dirty and try it out. Take advantage of the free account for one project, let your team members kick the tires for a while and compare notes.

The other day I noticed that someone had posted a quick poll on LinkedIn. I thought a poll like that might be a good tool to use for informal market research, so I clicked on the link to create my own. However, I was met with a message saying that I needed to upgrade my account to access the polling feature. I perused the prices, then quickly determined I wasn’t going to upgrade.

This isn’t the first time I’ve considered upgrading my LinkedIn account and decided against it, which led me to start thinking about all of the “freemium” apps — basically free apps with premium upgrades — I’ve been using. I started feeling guilty about taking advantage of the “free” in freemium services, especially because I’ve had the opportunity to interview founders of these companies, many of whom confess to struggling over pricing.  So what makes us decide to pay for an app?

My decision process works something like this:

1. Is it mission critical? Not every app or tool I use is critical to the well-being of my company, but some are. Our project management system? Critical. Our internal social networking system? Not so critical, because we’ve not all adopted it yet, but this could change.

2. How useful is the free version? In my WWD review, I was impressed that Deskaway’s free version had more features than Basecamp’s. That could have won me over, but its interface just didn’t work for me.

3. Can I live without more functionality? I used Basecamp for quite a while without ever thinking about the reporting available with a paid plan. I was getting my reports from Freshbooks, and Basecamp was just a way for me to manage client information when I was working solo. I only upgraded to the $24 per month plan when I needed to manage more projects. Payment made sense because I had so much more new work to cover the expense.

4. Should I upgrade and pay or seek out a different app? Once I began adding more team members to my company, Basecamp’s inadequacies for deeper project management became obvious. So instead of upgrading a notch or two further — and still not having the functionality we needed — we moved over to 5pm at $4/month more. Again, the cost was palatable because more team members meant greater productivity and more moving parts to manage, so it made good business sense.

5. Do the fee levels hit my sweet spot? I realize I have two tiers of apps that I am willing to pay for, each with its own sweet spot in terms of pricing. For apps that benefit the overall smooth functioning of my business and provide real value that I can quantify, I’ll pay around $25 per month. I feel comfortable having four of these. The second tier contains apps that are useful in some aspect of my work, and I’ll subscribe to up to five of these at $10 per month. That’s about my limit. Right now, I don’t have a real method for deciding how much I will pay — it’s all from the gut. But we’re working to measure the costs of doing business and the impact our apps have on our bottom line, so eventually I should have some real numbers to work with.

6. How entrenched am I? In some cases, I begin to feel “trapped” by the choice I made initially when I started with an app. If I need to upgrade and the next level is out of my price range, what then? When I left Basecamp, I couldn’t easily figure out how to migrate information over to 5pm, so I just downgraded my membership to a free plan, and now cannot figure out how to access my data so it just sits there. Over time, those assets will be outdated and no longer as valuable as they were the first months of the migration, but I still feel a sense of my data being trapped. Avoiding this trapped feeling — as well as avoiding a huge learning curve of a new app — are two big factors when deciding whether to move to another service.

7. Can I afford not to pay? If an app I’m using has a positive effect on my business’ bottom line–or moving away from it has a significant negative impact–then I’m much more likely to dish out the cash.

Back to the case of LinkedIn. The lowest monthly upgrade is $24.95. Per month. For me, that hits a sour note. I get so much benefit out of LinkedIn at the free level and have for years that there is no incentive for me to pay. Just missing out on that Quick Poll feature isn’t enough to entice me over to a paid plan.

All LinkedIn could do right now to win my paying business — possibly — is to remove the free level altogether. But by doing that, their entire business foundation would crumble as many people migrate quickly away.

How do you decide whether an app is worth paying for? Which services do you consider well worth paying for?

Image by stock.xchng user jana_koll

As I continue to struggle to find the ideal project or task management tool for my growing Web business, I find one app that really tracks project progress well but doesn’t handle individual task management then another app handles task assignments but doesn’t give me a view of the big picture.

Then there are the enterprise level apps that give me a headache to even look at because they cram a gazillion features and functionality into their interface. Or the apps that have robust features that I can’t find or figure out how to use.

Task2Gather is a pretty straightforward application for managing tasks plus it has an iPhone app which in my book is always a plus. On their site, they define their app as:

“…a free online service for task and project management that organizes your personal, family, social and business lives by keeping all your commitments in one place.”

I have mixed feelings about an app that organizes every aspect of your life although I know my whole like – not just my work – needs it. Still, when I see “organizes your family” on the same app that is supposed to organize my business functions in an efficient and cost-effective way, I get a little wary. But maybe this is the way organizational tools are moving – apps to take care of every aspect of your life because ultimately, they really are inter-related.

In order to get a good feel for Task2Gather, I asked my project manager Marla to test out the tool and give her assessment. Right now we are using Basecamp. I’ve sung the praises of Basecamp before, but these days the number of projects we are managing and the complexity of those projects – each with different combinations of team members involved – is making it harder to keep track of everything.

Marla, in her ever efficient way (thank goodness for organized humans!) came up with a list of pluses and minuses for Task2Gather. Here is what she had to say:

Pluses:

• One feature that my project manager really likes is the stats and reports feature. That could take the place of her weekly past-due reports that she generates by hand in a spreadsheet.
• She also likes that you can assign a deadline that shifts with the project’s priority.
• And she likes that you can see how close to completion a project is, but you have to put in hours spent. That begs to ask the question: Would everyone on our team take the time to enter their hours per project?

Minuses:

• Two things that she feels are lacking in Task2Gather are email reminders and when you post messages or comments, the application doesn’t appear to send copies of those messages to the team members assigned to the projects.
• Also, there isn’t a feature where you can upload file attachments.
• She also feels it is really hard to see the tasks, and especially the deadlines. I have to agree with her on that.

Overall:

Most of the features of Task2Gather are either the same or better than Basecamp and in some cases, just presented in a different way.

After getting Marla’s assessment, I asked Olga Shtaub from Task2Gather to address some of the minuses. Here is what she told me:

1. The emails are currently generated only to inform you if a new project was shared with you or when a new task was assigned to you. To notify about any changes in Task2Gather, there is the “News” feature. “News” contains changes made in Task2Gather like comments, deadline edits, task progress or any other changes that take place and that concern your tasks and projects where you participate. The “News” or changes emerge beside the project or task name and are marked with a bold font. Anytime you log in, you can see all changes and check them immediately. The “News” section is refreshed every 5 minutes.
2. Task2Gather is planning to add a new notification system so users can choose the way they want to be notified by the service.
3. The upload feature in Task2Gather is scheduled for release in the beginning of the next year.
4. The company is planning to change a little bit the UI, design and probably the colors of Task2Gather.

Overall, I think that when it comes to project and task management, it really boils down to not only your needs but your preferences. As cloud working continues to become more and more pervasive, the competition amongst the project management applications heats up in the battle to be better. So while Task2Gather may not end up solving my company’s project management quandries that are often very specific to the way Marla and I like to manage, it could be the perfect solution for another Web worker or Web working team.

What are you using today for project management and task management, and how is that solution really working for you?

Image via Wikipedia (LibSyn)

Before I fell asleep last night, I started thinking about what I’m spending on Web applications. I take advantage of the free levels of apps whenever I can, however, in some cases, I have to give in and pay for the services.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t have buyer’s remorse, but I do think I need to get a firm grasp of what Web apps or SaaS’s I have on autopay on my business credit card because it is getting to be too easy to charge these things.

Here is the list of Web apps I’ve been paying for and why I pay for them:

• Basecamp – $24/month – to keep track of communications and files with clients.
• FreshBooks – $24/month – to manage client invoicing.
• Typepad – $89.50/year for three blogs (about $7.45/month) – to develop three of my many blogs.
• Constant Contact – $15/month – to send out my occasional e-newsletter.
• Cafepress – $6.95/month – to sell Second Life swag.
• LibSyn- $5/month – to host my Cybergrrl Oh podcast about Second Life.
• SpinVox- $9.99/month – to convert my voicemail messages into texts and emails. (My service in the U.S. is actually through UReach.
• MeetUp – $72/6 months ($12/month) – to host several Meetup groups.

Total Fees – $104.39 per month or $1,252.68 per year

I began thinking that I should pay more attention to these payments. If the app is really valuable to my business, maybe I should consider paying for a year’s subscription in advance. Often, an annual subscription is discounted so I could save some money.

Then again, it might just be negligible. CafePress, for example, comes out to be $5/month for an annual subscription which would save me $23 for the year. Well, the theory sounded good when I was thinking about it. Still, if I were to subscribe to many more apps and sites, maybe the savings would become more significant.

Sites like Freshbooks and Basecamp don’t offer an annual fee. They use a pay-as-you-go model without committing you to a long term contract. Freshbooks does offer a lump sum payment where you can opt to pay for a number of months in advance but without any discount.

What are you paying on a monthly basis for Web apps and sites? Which ones and what do they do for you?

Project Management and Collaboration applications are one of the staples of the typical web worker. And while we’ve covered our share of alternatives, the ubiquitous Basecamp is the one that I seem to run into most often.

With a healthy userbase and a robust API, it’s no surprise that a number of useful add-ons have been created to make our Basecamp lives just that much easier. One such add-on I’ve been testing lately is Periscope by Ten Seven, Interactive.

Periscope is an iGoogle gadget that lets you quickly and easily log activity and time towards your Basecamp projects. It also provides a nice updating snapshot into the activity on your projects, even across multiple accounts. Activity is easily filtered by account or by project.

A hover lets you get a quick glimpse of the detail of each activity and a click takes you directly to the corresponding Basecamp page.

In this initial beta release you are limited to the aforementioned time tracking and logging. For now you’ll still need to visit your project pages to comment or add and complete to-do items. Increased interactivity for to-dos and milestones is on the roadmap for future enhancement though. In true 37signals fashion, Periscope is updated frequently with new functionality.

Periscope is iPhone friendly for easy access on the go, and it also works like a charm on your Windows desktop as a Google Desktop Gadget.

After a successful private beta, Ivan and the Persicope team are ready to open things up a bit. If you’re interested in participating head over to Periscope Gadget and register for access to the public beta which is going live a bit later today.

For both my own business and for reviews here on WWD, I look at a lot of Project Management applications. The pitches I get tend to be similar, all promising something different, a new way of looking at things, etc..

The reality is, even though they might each have their own strengths and weaknesses, they really do start to look and work the same. And then I took a look at Staction.

It really is different.

You interact with it differently.

One page – two boxes. That’s it.

You post content, add comments, create action items, log time, all from the same single interface. Enter your content in the box and a context sensitive area to the right lets you choose the options to automatically assign the appropriate tags.

Files can be quickly added and uploaded for sharing, to-dos assigned to others, and messages can edited or replied to easily.

You view your data differently as well.

Staction tracks projects but it’s really about tracking communication, and it does this remarkably well. It creates a single stream of all interactions across all of your projects.

Sound overwhelming? The Stream can be customized, filtered and then saved into views to show only the information that matches your current needs. An RSS feed is also available for each saved view. A demo video demonstrates this nifty feature very well.

Back when I first saw Pownce, I thought that it could possibly work as a small group collaboration tool. The threaded post view and file handling along with the ability to keep messages private between groups were all appealing features. Staction is oddly reminiscent of Pownce but fully fleshed out with the appropriate functionality needed to really make it a productive communication and collaborative environment.

On their home page, the Staction folks mention Basecamp as the standard project management app, and address how they differ.

Staction isn’t a me-too app. It’s not fixing what’s broken with Basecamp, -it’s a different way of looking at how groups get work done. Basecamp is about the project, and about the granular nugget of information. Staction is about the aerial view. With Basecamp you’re in the trenches. With Staction, you’re in the clouds.

If you are used to working in Basecamp or any of the other of it’s ilk, it may take some adjusting time to get used to this new way of viewing your projects. But while Staction may not look and work like other project management applications, it’s not so radical an interface to be difficult to use.

My hunch is that opinions will be polarized. You’ll either appreciate the change or you will stare at your screen wondering where all of your tabs are. There is a certain comfort that comes with a familiar interface and this might just challenge you to think a bit differently about your project and communication. I for one appreciate the new take on things and am eager to implement this in my own work.

Staction is from the same folks who brought us Jumpchart which we also reviewed favorably. While still currently in private beta, I encourage you to take a tour and join their mailing list to register for a chance to get involved.

Does a project stream interest you? Is there life in project management beyond Basecamp?

We do have a limited number of invites available through the links below. Act quickly though, when they’re gone, they’re gone.

http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=c97459059e
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=ddd7ce070a
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=821aad5d7d
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=6b8d088e39
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=612168adb0
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=071bba34e3
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=4d74ac0efc
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=8d2e75066e

I’ve been taking a lot of demos for project management solutions and while some are well-suited for the Web worker who is looking to get a handle on multiple projects, clients and virtual team members (like Basecamp), others are geared more toward the enterprise and aren’t even priced with a smaller team in mind (like GroupSwim).

Another SaaS project management system is Clarizen, and their raison d’etre is to “embrace the team” in the virtual work process. Clarizen seems to be the direct answer to the problem of a mid-level project manager hoarding control over the Microsoft Project files and not involving team members directly in more aspects of project management. Clarizen allows different levels of engagement – from the novice who only feels comfortable participating via email to the advanced users who log into the system and interact with all of the system’s tools.

Each person on a team gets their own personalized dashboard when they enter the system based on their particular role. So a project view shows only the aspects where you have a direct role. Clarizen has a robust engine for sorting content. You can drill down to view by project type and by your specific role such as just the projects for a particular client where you are the project manager.

You can drill down on tasks as well such as just the current tasks where you are responsible. The dashboard also let’s you see a progress report on each task. Color coded icons can tell you at a glance if a project is on track (green), running the risk of derailing (orance) or off track (red). Knowing the status of a project at a glance can help you prioritize your work day.

Basically, Clarizen offers centralized view of everything you need to know in any given project and allows you to break down content using powerful filtering. Your dashboard also features a What’s New section so you have an at-a-glance view of new projects, tasks, milestones, documents, notes and posts. You also get a visual timeline or “Road Map” of each project.

Email integration let’s anyone on the team report their progress without having to log into the system. Or they can log in to see how their work ties into the project timeline but they aren’t burdened with the clutter of information on tasks that don’t pertain to them directly. This is a useful feature when some of the parts of a project are outsourced to people outside the core team – they are only exposed to the areas that pertain to their work.

While Clarizen came out last October, their 2.1 version was released about two months ago. The turbo-filtering system at the dashboard level was part of the new features as was better support for Firefox, and budget calculations integrating each team member’s hourly rate. Clarizen also opened their API to developers. The company says they will roll out even more features at the end of September, alluding to a timetracking feature that will be “unique.”

Back to Reality

Despite all of these robust features, my impression overall is that Clarizen is meant for the enterprise. Priced at $24.95 per user per month, it isn’t as pricey as GroupSwim ($150 per month for 4-15 users) but isn’t as affordable as Basecamp ($24/month for 15 projects and unlimited users). Even though Web workers have multiple clients, projects and teams – and often different people on each team – an enterprise-level solution at enterprise-level prices just doesn’t cut it.

Still, for the Web worker who is part of really large projects that can support a higher-priced project management solution, Clarizen just might be a better tool than Basecamp.

How many clients/projects and team members are you managing at any given time? What are you willing to spend on your project management solution?

Collaboration is always a challenge for any team, but when that team is virtual, cloud collaboration presents its own set of organizational and tracking problems. GroupSwim is looking to step into the slot between e-mail correspondence and full-featured robust project management systems ala Basecamp. According to the company, GroupSwim is not for the management of a project but for the collaborative exchanges during the creation of deliverables.

While one of the company’s tag lines is “social collaboration for the enterprise,” I always look at software and apps from the standpoint of the lone Web worker who puts together various virtual teams for projects. Can GroupSwim be useful to distributed Web workers?

From the demo I saw of GroupSwim, the first thing that came to mind was a “smart” tool. GroupSwim uses “semantic technology” to create relevance and linkages between information and people on teams for any given project. Some aspects of this technology include:

1. Autotags – While the app will present possible tags for messages and other content submitted to each group site, you can also train the app to key in on important terms. This improves labeling and searching for relevant content down the road.

2. Focus – By providing greater relevance, search results within the group’s correspondence and work is more focused. The system even extrapolates the most popular content based on what has been read, replied to, and monitored.

3. Inferred Expertise - The system identifies individuals on a team who may have an expertise on particular topics based on their communications and responses to their communications from other team members. If you need to know who on the tream really understands social media, the system could point the way.

4. Related Information - Based on content entered including tags, the system recommends other content within a group’s interactions that may be relevant or related. At this time, related content is not pulled from the Web but this may be a future feature.

5. Instant Discovery – This is the “smart” search engine that evolves as the grup evolves and uses more tags. Tags appear in a tag cloud to also point out “hot” topics.

Web workers may prefer to set up a single GroupSwim site with multiple groups under it that can cover different projects or clients as well as different areas of a project utilizing different teams or parts of a team. A Web worker can set some of the groups to be common content for all team members while only giving certain team members access to other groups based on their involvement in a project.

GroupSwim offers role-based permissions for team members and your group types can be public, private, auto-join or custom. The company is rolling out a wiki feature in September that will be WYSIWIG and add another collaborative dimension to the application. All forum discussions, file feedback, and eventually wiki content can be received by team members either through an RSS feed or via email notification.

The tool offers various views and ways to access or break down content and discussions to zero in on exactly the information you need. You can sort by topic popularity or at a glance determine what topics are more popular based on a green bubble demonstrating the greatest activity.

You can also add a document for group collaboration by attaching it to a discussion, emailing the file into the system or uploading it directly. The system uses Scribd’s iPaper application for previewing uploaded documents in an elegant way.

Another upcoming feature will be integrated tasks although the company says they still are not looking to compete with the Basecamps of the world.

While all of the features of GroupSwim could potentially help a Web worker collaborate on multiple projects with far-flung teams, the pricing of the application leaves individual Web workers in the dust. At  minimum monthly fee of $150, I personally won’t even consider a tool like this, no matter how smartly it operates. Right now, I spend $24 for Freshbooks to manage my invoicing and $24 for Basecamp where I get a sufficient amount of organization and collaboration for my needs.

But if you really like the features of GroupSwim and think you might want to use it as a Web worker with a distributed team, contact the company and give them your feedback. Their pricing model is still new, and they seem willing to consider an alternate pricing plan for those of us who are non-enterprise level.

How can you see an application like GroupSwim fitting into your work process or can you? What other tools are you using for collaboration with your virtual team versus project management?

Although I haven’t kept a close eye on Elance, my impression has been that it was a basic job “bid” site for freelancer programmers. The site description summarizes their main focus as “outsourcing to freelance programmers, web and logo designers, copywriters, illustrators and consultants.” People with the jobs are the employers or “buyers” and the Web workers with the skills are the “providers” on Elance.

Since launching in 1999, the company has worked to expand their offerings, integrating some features to create more than just a job site and more of a work tool. What interested me beyond the job marketplace is Elance’s concept of a Remote Work System with the goal of creating a remote workspace for freelance workers to provide them with additional incentive to continue using the site after the job match has been made. The features are meant to help service providers manage a part of their work through Elance and give buyer and service provider more ways to connect and transact business.

The areas Elance has been beefing up to create their “remote work system” include:

1. The Interview Process. Beyond matching up a buyer with a service provider with specific skills that meet their project needs, Elance offer an integrated chat function and a click-to-call function that allows the buyer to place a call to the provider anonymously and for free. Providers can also take “certification” tests via Elance to evaluate their level of expertise and ostensibly giving buyers more of an assurance of a provider’s skills.

2. The Payment System. Elance now offers an escrow account so that once a buyer and seller match up, the buyer can place the payment into an escrow account via Elance with the intent to assuage the provider’s mind that the money is there upon completion of the project. The payment still needs to be triggered by the buyer so even once a provider completes the job, there is no guarantee that they provider will be paid. However, Elance also offers dispute assistance for both buyers and providers.

3. Tracking Project Status. With a new status reporting system in place, buyers can set milestones for providers to meet, and providers can report on their status showing progress against milestones on a percentage basis. Elance recently implemented  a time tracking widget that a provider can apply to a deliverable or milestone, add notes for the buyer, and attach files. The time tracker can also cover units of work such as blog posts. Status reports can then be converted into invoices once work is complete.

The company says that while they are offering enhanced features to help the buyer and provider manage a portion of the project, their site is not necessarily a replacement for a more robust project management system like Basecamp. Like Basecamp, however, the new Elance features offer an archive of interactions and communications between buyer and provider which is especially invaluable for a provider who is working on multiple projects at once.

Out of curiosity, I did several searches to see what freelance opportunities fit my skillset, experience and interest. There were a good number of web site and blog content development jobs open for bid, however, I found too many that didn’t seem to add up in terms of pay.

For example, one blogging job had a budget of $500 but were looking for someone to craft 5 blog posts per week. The duration of the project wasn’t visible but after just a few months time, the pay per post for that job would be embarrassingly low.

Another blogging job was paying an hourly rate which seemed a little unusual for work that is more commonly paid by the unit i.e. on a per post basis. Another wanted 20 articles for less than $500. Maybe a good job for an inexperienced writer working up some portfolio pieces, but there is no way to slice $500 by 20 and get anything resembling decent pay.

So while I’m not convinced Elance contains a wealth of well-paying, high-quality writing jobs for established Web content developers (I can’t comment on the programming jobs since I’m not a programmer), it could be a good place for a novice to find their first jobs. Plus the site provides some extras to help  manage those jobs.

What has been your experience with Elance or other “bid” job sites?

In my ongoing and seemingly never-ending pursuit to find the perfect Project Management solution, I recently put the smartsheet service through its paces to see how it would fit the bill.

Billing itself as an Online Project Collaboration tool, it features a familiar spreadsheet-like interface as its data presentation method, which should make a lot of folks feel right at home.

Unfortunately, I was able to disqualify smartsheet from contention for my purposes pretty quickly. There is a certain minimum level of functionality that I would think is required for a project management tool and as of right now Smartsheet just doesn’t fit the bill. I kept waiting for an Aha! moment when things would just click or I would discover the hidden menu items to access the project management functionality.

Smartsheet functionality like integrated file uploading and discussions (coming soon) are indeed upgrades to a traditional spreadsheet, but fall short of the consolidated messaging, task and deadline tracking that I would expect to find in a project management application. For example, there doesn’t seem to be a way to view all tasks assigned to me across all of my project sheets.

I think the flaw is that for me a spreadsheet is inherently the wrong vehicle for project management and building on enhanced functionality isn’t going to change that, no matter how well it’s done.

Smartsheet isn’t a bad application, and if you insist on using a spreadsheet for this purpose it can be a worthy upgrade. My recommendation though would be to also investigate one of the other project management solutions available that we have covered like Basecamp, DeskAway, or Joint Contact before making any decision.

Smartsheet Version 2 is currently in Beta and is an update to their existing Classic service. Free beta accounts are currently available while post launch pricing is not yet available.

Do you use spreadsheets for project management? Would an upgrade to Smartsheet be a benefit to you?

I’ve been using Web-based project management tools both as fodder for blog posts but, more importantly, to explore how they might positively impact my Web work. I’ve been using Basecamp the longest and pay about $24/month for a slightly upgraded service. After a small learning hump, most of my virtual team members are on board and some of my clients are working with it.

I also started using Deskaway’s free level of service for a new client project as I wrote about in May, and after a little over a month using it, my team and I are abandoning it because it just hasn’t been intuitive enough for us. So I recently learned about Joint Contact through a series of serendipitous events and decide to try it out. Next thing you know, I’m getting a demo from the company’s founder and having a great discussion about usability issues and incorporating social media tools into project management tools, namely Twitter.

What? Twitter incorporated into Joint Contact? What does that mean exactly?

Well, first, I have to say that from a usability standpoint, for me Joint Contact falls somewhere between Basecamp (which I find to be pretty straightforward) and Deskaway (which I find to be a bit confusing), and much closer to the Basecamp end of things. Like many new companies, they use some of their own terminology that doesn’t necessarily match up with what I’d expect things to be.

For example, when I wanted to sign up a team member, I couldn’t figure out where to go. Team History? No. Contacts? Maybe. But as I set her up as a contact, I saw a feature to convert her to an account then realized that team members were called Accounts and to add a team member you went to Subscriptions (Accounts). Messages are “Conversations.” Projects are “Workspaces.”

Once I wrapped my head around the terminology, I had a little blip with the icons. The workspace icon looks a little bit like a briefcase but I think it is supposed to be a folder. In Conversations, you cannot access the messages unless you realize you must click the tiny talk bubbles to the far right of the Conversation title. In Tasks, once I created one, I couldn’t figure out how to get back into it and during the demo learned that the little stapler icon on the far right was clickable. My comment that it would be helpful if the task title was also clickable was met with genuine enthusiasm.

But before you think I’m disappointed with Joint Contact, I have to say that not only do I love their clean interface, I love their eye toward innovation. They are trying to rethink the way we each work with our Web-based project management tools, from how we toggle between email and the Web-based tool to how our tasks also often have subtasks and that document management is as important as message management so being able to make certain files private versus public is useful.

The thing I’m most intrigued by is how Joint Contact is looking to integrate Twitter into their toolset to provide yet another way to notify team members of a new Conversation added to the Workspace. While this feature is still in the preliminary stages of implementation (i.e. available now but not with all anticipated capabilities), just thinking about how Twitter could actually be used as a work tool is getting my wheels turning about its implications on work process and information flow.

The company imagines several scenarios for Twitter integration. You can set up a private Twitter account for your team members and they can follow your tweets. Then tweets related to the project show up each time a new Conversation is posted letting them know to log in and get cracking – the title of each message in Conversations is the content of each tweet. All Conversations that have been “tweeted” have a tiny Twitter icon next to it. You can also set up a Workspace that consists solely of Conversations that you want to broadcast to Twitter and manage all “tweeted” messages in one place.

If you are someone like me who could use all the nudges I can get – from an email to a Tweet to a text message – in order to pay attention to something that needs to get done, I could change my Twitter settings to receive text messages for that particular project management Twitter account. And voila! I’m now fully informed, even when I’m Twittering and/or away from my computer.

Scott Blitstein recently wrote about Basecamp adding a new email interface that allows you to not only interact with Basecamp via email to respond to Messages, but you can now set up new project items. You can “create and assign custom email addresses to any area of your project and then forward messages, to-do items and milestones directly into your project without logging in.”

One piece that is missing from the Twitter integration right now is pretty mission-critical in my mind: the Conversation tweet does not yet have a link that brings you back into Joint Contact immediately – but that is definitely in the works. Still, if Joint Contact can provide this kind of functionality through Twitter or another more stable social networking/microblogging tool…I don’t know, it just seems to be a missing link in working through Web-based project management apps.

Keep your eye on Joint Contact, and if you like new apps that you can actively participate in helping to make a good product better, your input can really help the company to work out the fine details. You can read more about their thoughts about their Twitter integration on their corporate blog.

You can try them for free, and you get two users and two workspaces at that level. But if you upgrade to a paid account within 7 days of signing up for free, they will double your value to reward you for upgrading so quickly. If you choose a 5 user account at $15/month, they’ll automatically upgrade you to a 10 user account at the 5 user price – a $25/month value for only $15/month – and that price lasts for the duration of your account.

While 37signals recently added the oft requested ability to allow Basecamp users to reply to messages and comment notifications by email, a new add-on service called Mailmanagr takes that one step further by allowing you to create new project items as well.

Create and assign custom email addresses to any area of your project and then forward messages, to-do items and milestones directly into your project without logging in. It’s very useful for forwarding emails you receive outside of Basecamp into the system or for making quick entries from your mobile.

If you have implemented Basecamp in your organization and are still seeing significant external email discussions, Mailmanagr can help get these items into the system for tracking.  If your folks are really that resistant to logging in though, you may want to consider if you have made the right choice to accommodate the work style of our clients and co-workers.

Mailmanagr uses the Basecamp API to faciliate all of this so it does require you to provide your login details. Take a tour to see if Mailmanagr is for you before signing up for your free account.

Web Workers love to share their productivity secrets, and we can be quite evangelical about the tools that we use to manage our business. The folks over at 37signals have launched a new affiliate program for their Basecamp, Backpack and Highrise services that might be particularly appealing for someone who is already likely to be referring or recommending their services.

Unlike their previous program which gave you a one time credit applied to your account, this new plan pays you cash. You can get a one time bonus of 50% of sign up costs and then recurring revenues of 5% of future payments from people you refer. Lots of programs give you a sign up bonus but the recurring payment is a nice option and could really add up to significant sums.

They provide the standard links and graphics to help you promote and you can check your earnings in real time. Payments are made when you reach a $100 balance and are distributed through PayPal only. It is limited to the U.S. only for now. If you are already recommending their services, you can now get a couple of dollars in your pocket for your efforts.