Fuzzy scheduling tool Liquid Planner is expanding its reach into the collaborative task management market with a neat new feature called project portals. These are group pages that offer some of the same basic collaboration features you get with the core product, however they can be branded and shared with anyone else who is not a paying Liquid Planner customer.
Any project you're working on in Liquid Planner can now become "portalized." These pages serve as a central place to access shared files and lets outside users keep track on a project's status and ongoing tasks without the coordinator having to go out of their way to keep the other parties updated.
Every portal page includes a built in group microblog, that like Yammer, is a place for team members to provide small status updates on what they're working on. All the other users within that group can then track and respond to those updates, replacing big group e-mails and putting things like edit requests and approvals in the project's workspace.
Most importantly, portals have been designed to serve as a simplified heads-up display. For someone who hasn't used the product before, this makes it far more approachable. There are quite a few knobs and buttons, which give the service an incredible amount of power, but can be overwhelming to someone who isn't familiar with the product. This simply focuses on the basics of progress, tasks, files, and communication.
Project Portals can be branded to match a company or client's look and feel, and give both parties a quick eye on all the details of an on-going project.
(Credit: Liquid Planner)Liquid Planner is letting its users create as many project portals as they want, but unpaid users who have been invited don't get access to all of the service's planning and tracking features. For instance, these users cannot track time, or see the full detail and structure of a project the same way they could if they were a subscriber.
Next up for Liquid Planner is a mobile client. In a phone interview last week, CEO and co-founder Charles Seybold told me the first device to get a native Liquid Planner app will be Apple's iPhone. It's the platform that's most requested by the service's users--the majority of which are in IT. Seybold says the mobile client will bring live notifications, let project members edit task lists, and track project activity. The iPhone version of Liquid Planner won't be here until later this year though. After that, Seybold says other platforms should follow.
My final Under the Radar session today focuses on tools for business collaboration. In the past year, Webware.com has covered each of these four applications, but now they're each back with something new to bring to the virtual table.
Blist, an easy, engaging online database, will be releasing a premium version for small and midsized businesses. The easy, rich database environment can be used for business needs such as data storage and applicant-tracking, and features 3D graphs, drag-and-drop query-building, and document storage inside a database.
Next week Blist will add the capability to use others' data structures as a template for your next "blist." In addition to monetizing for the enterprise crowd, Blist will start placing ads on the free version.
Cozimo is a video and image collaborative annotation tool (see coverage). It shares a few similarities with FeedbackFX with much more attention on real-time collaboration of rich media documents. Each member in a work group is assigned a layer where they draw and scribble comments, all of which are saved in the session even as it's synchronously presented to the group. Cozimo can also be used asynchronously through a collaboration widget that can be pasted onto any image on any Web site. Like other collaboration tools, there's internal IM, though VoIP services aren't yet part of the equation.
LiquidPlanner's collaborative project management software doesn't gauge your project's progress by how on-target you are; it measures its deficiencies (coverage). LiquidPlanner can calculate schedules and predict using mathematical probability when a project is likely to get done. It also cooks up a range of best and worst case scenarios to project the soonest you'll conclude assuming everything goes right, and how long you'll struggle if everything goes wrong.
LiquidPlanner calculates project management estimates.
SlideShare (coverage) is a site for uploading and sharing PowerPoint, PDFs, and OpenOffice presentations and also folds in some social networking elements like blogging and podcast hosting. CEO Rashmi Sinha said she sees her company traveling more along the LinkedIn model for generating contacts than a YouTube for all sorts of PowerPoint presentations. E-learning and business presentations make up the bulk of the content, but there's also a fair number of photo slide shows and even some more adult content. There's also a Facebook application for easy uploading.
Going forward, SlideShare will introduce a program for lead generation a la LinkedIn. They're also talking about ad deals to monetize the free service and will work on integrating Google Presently documents.
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.
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