Webware

Online collaboration is one of the best uses of the Web, and project management is where it can really shine. I thought it would be worth taking a look at a product called OfficeZilla to see how well it stacks up against Basecamp and Teamwork, two established leaders in the online project management space. The results may surprise you.

Unlike Basecamp, OfficeZilla is free. That might suggest that it's underpowered when compared to the services that charge, but the differences are so minor you wouldn't find any reason not to use OfficeZilla. In fact, I think it's better-suited for small businesses with smaller projects than Basecamp, thanks to its simpler design.

The core of OfficeZilla revolves around modules. These are specific features of the service that you can custom tailor to match what you're using it for. When setting up your group, you'll be asked which ones you want included. They range from bible search (used primarily for bible study groups) to calendars and chat rooms.

Although OfficeZilla is free, the company charges for premium modules. So far, there are only a handful of them listed, like calendar filtering by groups, admin stats, and an enhanced user activity stream. They're pricey at $10 per month, and after reading about a few that are still being developed, I'm not convinced they're all that useful. I think Basecamp has it right and OfficeZilla should follow suit by charging a standard, basic fee for access to all its services each month.

OfficeZilla modules are useful for projects.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

After picking my modules, I started diving into OfficeZilla, adding a project, finding team members to perform tasks, and monitoring their progress. Adding a project couldn't be any simpler or more intuitive. From the project manager pane you can create a new project, give it a name, and input a description in just a few seconds.

Once created, you get a slew of options to start building out into a workflow. I started adding tasks to the project, and each new one brought me to a special task page which let me add notes and messages to other team members or upload files related to it. I would have liked to be able to track progress and see how far along my team was in completing that task--a feature that's conspicuously lacking from OfficeZilla--but the message platform is the next best thing. It allows other team members to annotate what they've done so far, which can keep you from having to send an e-mail or IM to check in.

One of OfficeZilla's most powerful features is its knowledge base module. It's a simple feature at first glance, but it can be an extremely functional tool if someone at a company spends time inputting relevant information.

But to do so, it's a bit more complicated than it needs to be. When I started creating categories in the Knowledge Base, I was forced to use the admin panel to add them instead of from the knowledge base itself. Once I had created a category from the admin panel, I could then go back to the Knowledge Base module and start adding tutorials and other information with the help of a full text editor, but it would have been nice to do it from within the tool's word processor. It lets you bold or italicize text, as well as increase or decrease font size and change alignment. It's basically like having Zoho Writer built into the module.

Usability
OfficeZilla is all about simplicity and trying to get you to do more with less. When uploading files or creating a to-do list, that's more than welcome, but for a company that has a detailed project with bundles of cash riding on it, that simplicity may prove to be a hindrance.

For example, OfficeZilla's Directory module which is a catalog of all project participant records organized by their name and job title, is useful if you want to quickly send a message to a team member, but it comes up short when you want to get an overview of your team's activity. There's no real-time data to know what they're working on, and you'll need to search through the various modules to see if they've left a message indicating the progress they've made.

"In Progress" is great, but it's not ideal.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

Worse, and perhaps the most frustrating feature of OfficeZilla, is its generic status update tags. When a task is created in the Project Manager, it's labeled "Not Started." Once the project manager or someone with access to modify the task starts working on it, they'll need to click on the current status pane and check a special box to note to others that work has begun. Until it's complete, the project status is listed as "In Progress." Once again, there's no indication given about how far along the project is, and simply saying "In Progress" doesn't help any project manager know, for sure, how close to complete it really is. Is it 20 minutes from completion or 20 days? "In Progress" says nothing.

Where OfficeZilla gets it right is in team communication. As I noted above, the site allows users to send messages in the Project Manager screen, but it also includes chat rooms, forums, and the option to send private messages to authorized employees. All of the options were superb, and I found that communicating with other team members couldn't have been easier. In fact, I'd say that OfficeZilla's communication platform is easily the best I've ever used in a collaboration service.

The final verdict

There are times when I'm in desperate need of a project management tool and using a service like Basecamp, one of the most powerful tools on the Web, is overkill. For those times, I would turn to OfficeZilla because it's simple to add a project and get down to the business of completing it.

But if I was running an organization that had a variety of projects that are not only time-sensitive, but complex and need to be monitored at every level, I wouldn't recommend OfficeZilla. The collaboration tool doesn't provide enough real-time information or tracking data to make it usable for mission critical projects.

NEW YORK--After listening to Jason Fried (37 Signals) give his compelling Web 2.0 Expo talk Wednesday about building companies in the modern world--which could be summed up as "simplify, and don't work too hard doing so"--I walked across the hall to hear Fraser Kelton (Adaptive Blue) discuss the negative ramifications of this strategy.

Kelton posed the question this way in his pre-conference writeup: "What happens when early adopters have become spoiled by single-feature technologies that take no more than a moment to grasp? The challenge faced by the next wave of innovative start-ups for technology adoption increases by an order of magnitude."

The real problem, he said during his talk, is not that Web 2.0 technology is easy to use, it's that it is too easy to build. Which means that there is "too much noise": too many new products vying for the attention of the early adopters who can give a start-up its first taste of success. And blogs don't help, he says: They encourage readers to skim without "chewing" on content, just as they encourage writers to post often and quickly, without writing thoughtful pieces.

In other words, there's a deluge of choice. Yet at the same time, social technologies moving into Web 2.0 products lock users in. Who wants to try a new, possibly better photo-sharing site when he or she has 10,000 photos already in Flickr?

Kelton has two possibly workable solutions to the start-up's dilemma: First, "make magic," he says. But on the back end, not the interface. Build a simple interface to a complicated service that isn't so easily replicated. He points to Google search. Simple UI. Rather complex on the server side.

Second, improve on existing products. Pointing in this example to Summize (acquired by Twitter) and Disqus (we're waiting) as services that add important improvements to existing platforms (Twitter; blogs), Kelton says that a start-up can ride on the success of a previous wave if its founders find a smart way to embed their technology in that of the key players in the market.

Obviously, it's easier to build just another single-function service than it is to come up with a plausible growth strategy and a unique service back-end. So both Fried and Kelton are right: Users gravitate to simplicity and focus. But if your business itself is so simple that anyone can replicate it, you don't have much of a business after all.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

If you use Microsoft Project, you might want to seriously consider three alternatives that run completely on the Web. In addition to supporting more contemporary features right now, and getting updated with even newer gadgets more frequently than Microsoft can muster, these products, being completely Web-based, offer much more robust collaboration tools.

First up: Liquid Planner. We saw this product at Demo 2008 but it will be on stage again at the Under the Radar conference that I'm moderating on Thursday. This tool's special sauce is its embrace of uncertainty. Users can put in best-case and worst-case estimates for their tasks, and the product combines all the estimates to tell you how likely you are to make deadlines, and also which sub-tasks are the most critical to achieving project goals.

Then there's Clarizen, the 2.0 version of which comes out this week. This product has a very nice, very Web 2.0 user interface, but what I like best about it that most users will never see the UI: managers can set up projects on the Clarizen site, but people responsible for delivering on those projects never have to use it. The product sends e-mail queries that users can update directly, bypassing the main site and the $50 monthly per-user fee as well.

Finally, there's the specialized Mumboe, which we'll also see at Under the Radar. This is a Web-based "CLM" (contract lifecycle management) app, but it's apparently one of the first to have a completely free subscription tier. The tool tracks the documents that go into a business agreement, and lets you specify start and end dates, deliverables, commitments, and tracking metrics. You can delegate tasks, of course, and also see your entire list of deliverables and commitments on one dashboard screen. Mumboe will also be at Under the Radar.

Join me at Under the Radar!

I stink at project management and can't offer an expert opinion on these products, but I do think that if you are a project management software user, you might want to try one of these Web-based tools. Of course, don't forget to also check out Basecamp.

HiTask is a(really simple collaborative task management tool for small groups. Members can create tasks, meetings, reminders, notes, and birthdays to add to their own schedule or assign to others. The entire interface is drag-and-drop, and any actions by team members will instantly be reflected on your tasks page. It's a mix of a scheduling app and to-do list tool that's dead simple to use. In testing, we were making and managing several projects in less than five minutes without reading any documentation, which bodes well if you're collaborating with non-tech-savvy people.

Adding tasks to HiTask's daily schedule via drag-and-drop. Color coding per item will also show up.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Assigning tasks to other users is really simple. Once you've created a task, you can just drag it over to the group member's name. You'll get a note on the task letting you know who you've assigned it to, and as soon as they're done with it you'll be notified in real time. Likewise, when a group member assigns something to you, it will show up on your schedule, along with a note of who it's from. The one thing missing from HiTask is the option to view other members' schedules, which would be helpful--especially for gauging how much is on someone's plate.

If you do need to talk, there's a built-in chat module, which is limited to one-on-one. There's no way to group chat, or share files like you get with some more advanced group collaboration tools like BaseCamp, and activeCollab, but HiTask is pretty early in development.

HiTask has both a free and premium service. The free service reaches its limit at 10 tasks, making it little more than a demo. The $15 a year service provides unlimited tasks, group members, and projects. See the screenshots after the jump.

Related: Under the Radar Office 2.0 coverage of group collaboration tools.

[via SolutionWatch]

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37signals launched Highrise this morning. It's a customer relationship management (CRM) tool aimed at small groups and medium-size businesses. Highrise is meant to fill the gap between Outlook's contact manager and complicated CRM apps that require an IT department to keep running smoothly. It's also priced below SalesForce.com's Team Edition, with more of an emphasis on contact communication and history, rather than sales and forecasting. It's a Webware solution for people who don't want to install CRM software or manage a huge database, and who need a tool that can be accessed on the go.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Highrise launches with six different plans, five of which are paid services with the benefit of shared group storage, increased contact and collaboration limits, and relation-based information pages called "cases." Each tier of service can be upgraded or downgraded at any time, and there's no contract.

In Highrise, each case file can contain information about multiple companies; contacts; and any important information like notes, shared files, and e-mails. By grouping this information in one place, you can create a detailed history or context for a group or contact. Highrise has some built-in tools for organization as well. You can schedule phone calls, reminders, tasks, or basic to-do lists, and assign or include other Highrise collaborators. It's not nearly as deep a system as you get with 37signals' group collaboration tool Basecamp, but if you see something you want a colleague to follow up on, you can do it without firing up your e-mail client.

For integration with your e-mail, Highrise recommends that you set up your e-mail app to automatically forward everything to a special Highrise address. Highrise will parse your messages, and copy over any attachments along with the original text to the contact's profile page on Highrise. If you haven't already created the contact in Highrise, the app will create it for you.

Yesterday 37signals founder Jason Fried posted about the team's upcoming contact management app called Highrise. The goal of the app is to help you manage contact information in a better way than relying on Post-its or your current software-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Think of it like a Rolodex but with collaboration and more space to write things down. Many people can have access to the same records at once, and from the announcement, 37signals thinks they can do better than your current CRM.

In many ways Highrise is a solution for a problem with Web communication technology: we have these great contact management tools with services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Plaxo to bring them all together, but no way to share them, and add notes or related items. There are a few Web-based CRMs out there, such asFunclient and absoluteBUSY, but none that have the potential to tie into a suite of highly successful Web apps (see Basecamp and Writeboard). I can also see a big use for this for keeping track of friends or colleagues as they move all over the place, more so than relying on LinkedIn or social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Fried made no mention of pricing or a release date in the Highrise announcement, but noted that the 37signals team is "very happy with it." We'll post something more in-depth as soon as we get our mitts on it.

A little Web service called IMified caught my attention this morning. It is an ambitious service that lets you access several popular Web applications from your instant-messaging client. IMified is a messaging bot (like SmarterChild) that lets you manage your apps via text commands. In theory, it could also be used on any IM-equipped mobile phone to turn the phone into a remote control for your Web apps.

Signing up to the service requires no site registration or passwords. To begin, you just add the messaging bot to your buddy list and send it a message. Adding additional services (like Blogger, Basecamp and Wordpress) is done through a special section of the IMified home page. Besides these services, IMified doubles as its own productivity tool with notes, reminders, and to-do lists.

There are some interesting real world uses for IMified, particularly using collaborative apps like Google Spreadsheets. Here at Webware, we created a couple of Google Spreadsheets to share our ideas. Theoretically, IMified could be used to add items to our spreadsheets. IMified could also be used to live blog from your phone using a service that wasn't intended to do so, such as Backpack from 37Signals.

Adding services to IMified

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Accounts are managed through a special section of IMified's Web site. There you can set up user names and passwords for each service. Compatible IMified sites are set up to work through the developer's API, so if your favorite service doesn't have one, it likely won't be added to IMifieds list.

Having a group of Web apps to access while on the go is an exciting idea. What piques my interest is whether or not the casual user can handle a text-based interface for multiple and visually rich apps. After thoroughly enjoying Google's mobile Gmail application, I'd like to see IMified evolve into a downloadable Java app for phones that could incorporate an easy-to-use graphical interface, yet combine the simplicity and the ease of use that IMified was designed to provide.

[Found on Museum of Modern Betas]