Web Worker Daily

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft Office had the collaborative and cloud storage functionality of Google Docs? Well, now it does, using a free add-in called OffiSync that launched into public beta today. Offisync adds a toolbar to Office that allows you to use Google Docs for file storage and collaboration.

Once installed, Offisync adds a new toolbar to your Office apps. (Offisync works with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations.)

The Offisync toolbar

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Back in July when I originally covered the beta of Smartsheet Task Manager and Project Collaboration service, I had some reservations about adopting it. While I thought it was a strong app, I also believed it was lacking some of the core features I would need.

With their official launch of V2 today, I wanted to give it another look to see how things have changed since I last looked. I also had an opportunity to chat about Smartsheet with founder and chairman Brent Frei who shared with me some of the design philosophy behind the service and productivity in general.

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