Web-Based Project Management Tools Experience

We did a little searching around today for web-based project management. The first results in Google were sponsored links for TeamWorkZone.com, eProject.com and AutoTask.com. These might be great tools but I didn’t spend any time looking at them because I couldn’t find any pricing on the web sites and no demo was available without filling out a form. So I couldn’t tell if they had such great tools I would be willing to be contacted by someone to give me a demo. That and the combination that there was no pricing led me to believe they would be expensive.

So I went back to the core. I signed up for a free trial of BaseCamp and Zoho Project. Basecamp was eliminated because I couldn’t put dates on the To-Do items. I know you can put them on Milestones but not everything that needs to be done in a week is a ‘milestone’.

Now Zoho compared to Central Desktop. Zoho has a more visually appearing interface. We also liked the reports. The pricing is good. The thing that kept us from converting today? The inability to add comments to a task. There’s no way for staff or update or reassign a task and add a comment related to the change. This is possible in Central Desktop. Also like the way task lists are available via links on the left navigation in Central Desktop. It would be nice to be able to see this in Zoho.

One thing that definately needs to be fixed in Central Desktop is that if you have a long list of task and you scroll down the page and edit one, the date selection overlay appears at the top of the page, not where you are on the page. Apart from that, I think I owe Central Desktop an apology. The product actually includes a well rounded set of elements for task management. However, I would switch to Zoho if I could add comments to tasks. Primarily for the reports and the way milestones can have a date range, it’s very helpful for building a tactics gantt chart rather than just a task gantt chart.

 So there you have it, focus group of one.

Need Your Help - Online Project Coordination

Need your help. I’m looking for a free online project coordination tool. Something that will allow us to track milestones and tasks and have multiple users. We’ve used Central Desktop, it’s okay but has incredible limitations on it’s ‘Free’ version. It seems the free version is only good for very high level activity and at most one or two people. I’m extremely dissappointed in the ‘free’ offering and at the end of the day the interface was not all that fantastic and you could only have two levels of tasks. Anyway, what are my other options?

I see Basecamp has a free offering but is limited to 1 Project but I can’t tell what that means from a user standpoint. If I can create tasks and sub-tasks then 1 project would be fine but if it’s like basecamp where you can have only 1 group of tasks then that, of course, is useless.

Any suggestions?

Slowing Down for the Holiday

Well we’ve reached the bottom of the PR trough with the holiday coming next week. The blogs are slowing down, the only press releases that come out will be the ones they don’t want you to read. Alternatively, who will want to make the first splash of the new year? Who will have the first press release of the year? Zimbra, Zoho, Foldera? I’ll provide what link bait I can for whomever’s first. Just don’t tell Google, otherwise I might have to add a ‘NoFollow’ tag….

 Here are a few other things I’d like to see in 07:

A comprehensive chart of who offers what in terms of applications for business; email, ’word’ documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint, project planning, etc. Any volunteers? You should be able to get a lot of links for something thorough. 

Will storage size stop being used as a product differentiator in 2007? Can someone please do a survey for us and let us know if customers really see this as a key factor?

How many new products will Zoho launch in 07? Raju or Arvind, is there a Zoho Mail coming?

Do those ratios in Nichebot really work? (Keyword campaign in progress.)

Foldera Launch….. Still skeptical Oliver & Dave…. you can send my beta login to catchyaintit [at] yahoo.com  

Who will have a mash up for Goowy first?

Which conference, related to our topics here, is THE one to go to for 2007?

Will the expanded features of products like Zimbra, HyperOffice and others begin to make a serious dent into the Hosted Exchange market? 

What do you think will be interesting with everyone in 2007, basecamp, bluetie, everyone.net, foldera, fusemail, hyperoffice, intermedia.net, load.com, mailsnare, mailstreet, MI8, myoffice.net, norada, runbox, scalix, sherweb, simplicato, solodox, swishmail, thinkfree, usa.net, webmail.us, zimbra, zoho…

What else needs to be covered?

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