Web Worker Daily

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.

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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?

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