Basecamp

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

Who says government can't innovate? As the US Small Business Administration recently demonstrated, government can innovate, and increasingly does so with open source.

The US Small Business Administration just won the prestigious 2008 GCN Technology Leadership Award for its innovative Business.gov website, a site that had formerly been bogged down by proprietary BEA software. No more. The site, which coordinates some 9,000 resources throughout the US federal government for 21 different agencies, has seen a 30 percent increase in traffic since it was resurrected through open-source technologies, including Alfresco.… Read more

Basecamp is a Web-based project management tool from 37signals. Groups can come together and work on large or small projects, sharing the same collaborative space.

It's essentially a mash-up of various productivity tools, including a to-do list maker, shared storage space, message boards, and calendaring. What has made it so successful is how it's been tied together. It's well known as a service that fits both personal and group organization into one handy tool.

Basecamp has several tiers of service, with varying degrees of shared file storage and active projects.

Winner: Basecamp (BasecampHQ.com) Category: Productivity

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 … Read more

Category: Productivity

Basecamp is a Web-based project management tool from 37signals. Groups can come together and work on large or small projects, sharing the same collaborative space. It's essentially a mash-up of various productivity tools, including a to-do list maker, shared storage space, message boards, and calendaring. What has made it so successful is how it's been tied together. It's well known as a service that fits both personal and group organization into one handy tool.

Basecamp has several tiers of service, with varying degrees of shared file storage and active projects.

Web site: www.basecamphq.com… Read more

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.

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]

… Read more

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.

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. … Read more

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: … Read more