Part II: Web 2.0 > Online Project Management > Gmail > Outlook > VBA > Labels


Part II: Online Project Management


If you've read my previous post - Part I of this rather all-encompassing subject : ) - then you already know that I carry a slight fascination for the countless possibilities the Internet has recently begun to offers us. As I've mentioned earlier, I could probably be described as the curious, playful type - discovering and exploring the many new things that appear daily on the Web is simply fun. But beyond the entertainment factor there is also a very concrete reason why I appreciate this ever-developing infrastructure. Here's why...


I am a member of small, Canadian NPO that owns the rather unusual name "Locus Suspectus". A quote from our mandate:

"Locus Suspectus is a magazine of art and culture that engages in an interdisciplinary dialogue between contemporary critical theory and practice. Our goal is to showcase emerging artistic talents and contextualize them within internationally established artistic accomplishments and scholarship. ..."
(Sounds interesting? Please visit us at Locus Suspectus)


What began as the vision of three inspired individuals with a passion for art very quickly took shape and grew into a small but international undertaking. We are still a tiny fish in the pond but Locus Suspectus has already successfully made its appearance in galleries in Canada, Europe and the United States. At this point the people working for the magazine live in several different Canadian provinces, as well as in Austria, the Netherlands and in England. Which finally brings me back to the original subject: the services and infrastructure of the Web 2.0. Because, to put it simple, without this infrastructure we probably wouldn't be around.


While large enterprises can usually afford to develop and maintain their very specific workflow and network infrastructure, this is pretty much impossible for smaller teams on tight budgets and limited manpower. Luckily, these days the Net offers enough resources to create an efficient workflow for your small and medium-sized project team. The following solutions are based on hosted services; therefore you and your team can focus on your actual business and don't have to worry about installing and maintaining server-side software, or backing up your data on different servers. Another huge bonus: All the services mentioned are free, or offer at least a free version with reduced functionality.

So what do you need to keep your nationally or internationally distributed team members connected and your project on track? Well, of course every organization has its specific needs; in many cases though the following components should cover most of your requirements:

• A customizable web platform as an entry point to your online tools
• A central email account
• A central calendar
• An online project management tool
• An online file storage and file exchange platform
• A web-based customer relations management tool

Let's begin with the first one. At this time, Google's Customized Homepage and Netvibes are the most frequently used personal portal pages. Both should work equally well for our purposes, both have a huge user community and keep adding functionality to improve the user experience. To give you a better idea of what you can expect, here is a screenshot of the Locus Suspectus portal page, hosted on Netvibes.





This is the entrance platform for online collaboration for the Locus Suspectus team members. It provides a complete overview over the current state of affairs in our project. Building such a page is very easy - all the components you see are pre-fabricated; your remaining task is to choose the ones you find suitable from a collection of about 300 tools and to add them t0 your page.

• The three clocks in the middle column serve as a reminder that our members live in different time zones. This is helpful when scheduling a telephone conference or a chat meeting. Below is the obligatory set of search engines, and a little infobox for short announcements to the team.
  
  
• On the top left we have a calendar box. It's an iCal implementation and connects to our Gmail Calendar, where we keep our events and meetings up to date. The three main views - Agenda, Week and Month are just a mouse click away.
  
  
• The little widget below the calendar is hooked to our main email (Gmail) account. Right at our project start page it provides a quick overview over the most recent messages. A click on its header bar brings you directly to the inbox of your Gmail account.
  
  
• On the bottom left we maintain our bookmarks collection. From there we have quick access to our project management platform (Basecamp) and our CRM tool (FreeCrm).
  
  
• On the right side we have a very neat interface to Box.net, the online service we use for file storage and file sharing. Much of the functionality of this excellent service is directly accessible from this module. For example it is possible to up- and download files and to create or delete online storage folders right from this little box.
  
  
• Below an equally important tool: This is the Netvibes feed reader, connected to the RSS feed of Basecamp, our online project management tool. Whenever somebody posts a message, creates a new Todo or completes a Milestone on Basecamp, the activity is published immediately on our project start page. You can have more than one feed reader on your portal page, for example one for Basecamp and an additional one for your client's feed ...
  
  
  

Remember, this is just a subset of the tools available. You will find a lot more modules that might prove useful to you. Let's move on to the other items on our list ...

A central email account: Our organization uses several email accounts - for submissions, advertising, feedback, etc. All accounts are tied to our master email account. Whenever a message arrives in an arbitrary account it is immediately forwarded to the master account. Because of its rich feature set and its more than 2 GB of storage, we have chosen Gmail for this purpose. This structure allows us to have all incoming and outgoing mail stored in one single place. Of course Gmail offers Pop3/Smtp, so you can download the messages to your offline email client. Link: Gmail

A central calendar: Another score for Google :-). Its calendar is quite powerful and can even merge with other web-based calendars that understand the iCal format. We use this feature to transmit the agenda from our Basecamp project management platform right into our Google calendar. This way we have the dates for every meeting, event, or project milestone right on our platform page. If your offline information manager (Outlook, Entourage, ...) is capable of handling the iCal format, you can synchronize the Google calendar with your local client. Other features of the Google calendar are sending meeting requests or event reminders to your email or phone. Link: Google Calendar

An online project management tool: A must for any project that exceeds a certain complexity or time span. The problem with many project management tools is that they are overly complex, offer too many features and distract more than they help. Not every team member is an IT MA. The operators of the Basecamp service achieve a good balance between amount of features and ease of use. Even their free version is pretty complete and provides a practically ad-free user experience. The interface is clean, appealing and easy to get used to. Basecamp offers the tools you need for project management: Milestones, Todos, messages and (commercial version only) time tracking. Messages and Todos can be linked to milestones; an overview page immediately informs you about upcoming and surpassed deadlines as well as about recent activities on the project. The message forum is extremely important for a distributed team - it provides what email can't: a place for discussion and exchange of ideas. I've already mentioned that Basecamp offers RSS feeds for recent activities and milestone events. There's also a chat function built right into their website - no additional software needed. Link: Basecamp




And yes, we've cleared our late milestones by now!

An online file storage and file exchange system: Another must for distributed teamwork. Sending documents back and forth via email simply doesn't work. You need an online file repository where your data is save and accessible at the same time. Many online file storage systems are available today; Box.net is a very reliable and feature-rich representative of this category and has never let us down. They offer a free version with some limitations: You get 1 GB of storage with a file size limit of 10 MB. Their premium plan is already available for $4.99 per month and offers 5 GB of storage, a file size limit of 1 GB and a bandwidth limit of 20 GB per month. If you can convince ten friends to sign up for their service, Box.net will upgrade you from the free account to the premium account for free (for one year). They have 24/7 support through email and phone - an important fact to consider when it comes to the safety of your organization's documents. Other features are public and private file sharing, blog posting and (apparantly soon) an application called "Desktop Sync", which will automatically keep your online and offline data synchronized. Link: Box.Net

Web-based customer relations management: Once the number of your clients and partners is growing you'll probably need some sort of CRM tool. The best solution for a distributed team is again a web-based service, making the data available to every member everywhere. FreeCRM is a hosted customer relation management service that offers a very decent entry-level version (free, but ad-sponsored). Their introduction video will give you a better impression than I will be able to do, check it out here: Tour. It should be noted that the free version doesn't offer SSL encryption. You will have to decide whether you can afford to transmit your client's data over an unsecured connection. There's always the option to locally encrypt critical files. Link: FreeCRM

And that's about it. If distributed teamwork is a topic for you, then I hope I've been able to give you some ideas. Our organization has been using the structure and most of the systems described on this page for about a year - without any problems so far. Nevertheless I encourage you to carefully read the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy of each provider and find out if they agree with your business model.

Feel free to post your questions and comments.


Are you using Gmail as your email service and Outlook as your offline client? Have you got hooked on Gmail's labels and want to use them in Outlook too? Are you interested in old-fashioned VBA code? Check out Part III !

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