The collaboration service Wrike is rolling out today. It's an online task database for groups, with a special power: You can enter shared tasks just by e-mailing people and copying to wrike@wrike.com.
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That is about the easiest way I can imagine to create and assign tasks. It's even easier than using Outlook's own Tasks list, which actually is not a bad task manager for small work groups (it's awful, though, if you're trying to work with somebody who's not on your Exchange server).
I also like the way Wrike signs up new users: When you send somebody a message and cc Wrike, the recipient is automatically signed up. The system sends them a follow-up message with a temporary password and a link that gets them on the system in no time. This makes Wrike very viral, which is not something you often see in a business application.
Once logged in to the Wrike site, you're supposed to be able to do a lot more with your tasks: Put them in categories and groups, sort by due date, attach files, and so on. Those features weren't showing up for me in the beta today, though.
Wrike reminds me of Smartsheet, which I covered last week. Both products have fairly straightforward interfaces to group task lists, and they use e-mail very effectively. Smartsheet doesn't (yet) have Wrike's cool assign-by-e-mail feature, but both systems can send alerts to taskmasters (and task watchers) via e-mail.
Wrike was a hit at Le Web 3 conference in Paris this week, according to my spy there, Cathy Brooks of the Guidewire Group. Also, the Wrike team has a video demo that reviews some of the features not yet in the public beta.
We've covered the Web 2.0 startup SmartSheet a bit over the past two months [see stories on News.com], but we haven't had a hands-on review. In light of two important changes with the product that roll out on Thursday, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at it.
SmartSheet is a tool for tracking group jobs and tasks. It apes the user interface that many people use to track projects--the spreadsheet--but it's got features more like a work flow application. For example, you can highlight a row (usually, a row is a task), and click the "ask for update" button in the toolbar, and SmartSheet will send an e-mail off to the person to whom the task is assigned asking for status. They can put their update directly into the form they get in their e-mail, and the update will show up in the sheet.
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SmartSheet will also send you regular updates for individual tasks. For example, you can ask it to e-mail you a status update on the projects that matter to you, half an hour before your weekly meeting with your boss. Could be useful.
Microsoft Project this isn't, but it's a very solid tool to keep track of all the moving pieces in a project or in a small company. And it doesn't require a radical relearning of project management. In fact, it reinforces the sloppy management practice of using a spreadsheet to track projects and tasks. Almost everybody tracks tasks this way, though, and that makes SmartSheet very easy to learn and use.
SmartSheet was far too expensive when it launched; $75 a month for five users was too much for small businesses to experiment with, and even too much for some middle managers on expense accounts at large companies. On Thursday, SmartSheet will release a free version. It will allow unlimited users into each sheet (project), but only 10 projects per user. In addition, it won't allow attachments.
Paid versions, starting at $25 a month, will allow more projects per user, as well as some attachments. Higher-priced plans will support more storage and even corporate branding.
On Thursday, the system will also let users save projects as "templates" that can be reused by co-workers and made available to other SmartSheet users. A good template may well reflect the best practices of how to run a standard project (such as closing escrow or hiring a new employee), and allowing the reuse and evolution of templates could help a lot of people. Templates will also make it much easier to start using the product.
I did run into a few small snags with SmartSheet. There were many times when it asked me to save the work I was doing. I prefer Google's spreadsheet, which saves your work as you go. There's also no way to format your text to be bold or in color, which is a bit of an oversight. Finally, the service did crash on me once (I had to close my browser tab to recover), although I did not lose any data.
Project management is complex, but SmartSheet is simple. It took me only a few minutes to understand the product and to start using it effectively. I especially like the fact that I can use it to poll other people about tasks, but they don't have to sign up for SmartSheet or use it directly. This is a well thought-out project management system, worth a try by anyone who's ever kept a list of things to do in Excel.
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