Google Sites
July 23, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Free, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, Issue trackers, Productivity, Project managementGoogle Sites: A poor man's (pretty darn good) intranet. An online, Google-hosted wiki-meets-project management software service. Google gobbled up Jot Spot (a hosted wiki service headed by Joe Kraus) before it even really got going, it was later re-born as Google Sites. Google I have a growing and widely dispersed team for my latest venture. I've set up a Google Sites website which is serving as an "intranet" for this team, and it's working quite well. It's like a wiki in that anyone (whom you allow) can edit or add pages or documents. It also has several built-in tools to help you create things like, a file download repository, a todo list, an issue tracker, or an announcements board. Most anyone can set one up and manage it, it's not difficult, there are no HTML skills required. You have some limited control over the look and feel; for example you can easily brand it with your own logo and colors. They've made management of the site very simple. You can invite others as owners, collaborators or just viewers. You can also optionally make the site visible to everyone on the internet. You get 100MB of storage space for free, and can bump that up to 25GB per account for their paid version which costs $50/user/yr. They even have an API. My primary beef is no discussion forum built in. That would make it twice as valuable for us. Even if they just took Google Groups and married it in, we'd have a winner. This is a huge omission. I would also like the option not to have previous versions of all my pages available to everyone. It's not a huge deal, but I don't need the last umpteen version of a page viewable forever, and there's no facility to disallow this. Free for most everything, $50 per user per year for the deluxe version with lots of storage space. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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There are also many more options available through "Gadgets" like a Google Calendar, a Presentation (read: Microsoft Powerpoint-like document), or a Spreadsheet. Plus hundreds of third party gadgets like maps, weather, games, news feeds, and chat. Not to mention a million other useless things no one would ever want (Woody Allen quotes?). Fortunately it's easy to ignore that stuff.What could be improved?
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RescueTime
July 2, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, ProductivityRescueTime: A time management and analysis program. RescueTime (3 guys rocking it with some YCombinator funding to start) Because it achieves the holy grail of being fun to use, and darned useful too. It consists of two parts. An application (software) you install on your computer (PC or Mac) and a website which reports on your time usage. While it's pretty helpful even with zero configuration effort (just install and let it go), you can really make it come alive if you spend a little time telling it about the things you do through simple tagging, and rating for productivity. It's an intuitive process that unfolds as you want it to. The usability is solid. The first benefit to me was realizing just how much time I was frittering away with useless garbage. It was troubling information. Well, harrowing is more like it. And it has already changed how I use my time. As an entrepreneur, being accountable even if only to RescueTime is proving to be very valuable. The old "what gets measured gets improved" adage once again proves true. I'm rigorous about measuring so many other things, it's a little embarrassing I haven't applied that better to my time until now. I guess I just needed the drop-dead simple "do it for me" solution that RT provides. In addition to measuring time, RT lets you set up goals, which it then tracks for you. Some example goals might be "spend more than 3 hours per day working on my secret project" or "spend less than 1 hour per day on email." They also have some paid features that allow groups to use it together so you can compare how you spend your time versus the average member. I haven't dived into that. Everything I'm using is free. I've really resisted having a big crush on RT, but have so far failed. I love it. This is still immature software, and it's important to know that going in. I sincerely hope they can make their revenue model fly so that they can evolve this to the point where they build on the killer progress they've made so far. In fact, if they would address the issues I'm about to outline, I would be perfectly happy to pay a modest fee (say, $4/mo) to keep my records indefinitely (right now they only keep a 3 month backlog) and have the following features: 1. I'd like to do intra-application tagging. For example - if I'm writing a poem about my dog in Word, I'd like to tag that differently than a work proposal for a new client. As it is today, they only break things out that way for the web browser. 2. I'd like to be able to manually enter time. Right now it only tracks your time at the computer - which it does spine-tinglingly well. But if I have an off-site meeting, I'd like to enter that in as productive time to gather a more accurate picture. My other lingering concerns are privacy, and support. Privacy: You're sending some potentially pretty sensitive information up. They've got some mechanisms in place to limit what you send if you want. For example, they've got a web site whitelist so you can say "only send specifics from this set of websites" so you'd specify the top 20 or so websites you frequent, and everything else would be sent as generic web use. You can also easily turn off logging for a period of time, you can tell it to ignore certain data (which is claims to delete and ignore), and finally if you have a panic attack, you can delete your account and all data, which presumably deletes it all from their servers. However, even with all this, the privacy policy still feels a little weak. Essentially stating, "we'll never look at your data, unless we need to" [link]. Mint.com for example says something more like, "we won't ever look at your data, and couldn't if we wanted to" [link]. Obviously Mint.com deals with more sensitive data - but for many users, that doesn't matter. Support: This is a pretty minor concern, but I'll mention that I ran into some odd logging times, sent an email to support, got an almost instant personal reply (under 1 min) with some information, and a request to send some debugging logging information to them, which I did, but I never heard back (it's been about a week now). It wasn't a critical issue, it's free software, and it actually seems to be behaving properly now (I may have just done something stupid) so I didn't push it. Free for individuals, unlock some groupy/teamy goodness starting at $7.95/mo for the first 6 users, and $7.95/mo more per user after that. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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The software logs the applications you use (a plain text log). By default it logs in two-second increments to paint a pretty accurate picture. Then every 30 minutes it beams this information up to the mothership. The mothership is a glorious reporting site you can pull up to see how you're using your time. It features all manner of reporting graphs and charts. It shows you how productive you're being, where you spend your time, how you're doing on your goals, and more. What could be improved?
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FogBugz
June 11, 2008 in 5 out of 5 stars, A piece of software, Hosted software, Issue trackers, Project managementFogBugz: They say it's project management software, which it is — but its real strength (and reputation) is issue/bug tracking. They have hosted, and installable versions of the software. I use their hosted version (dubbed FogBugz on Demand). Fog Creek Software I like and use Basecamp, but on a current large project I found myself heavily using Basecamp's ToDo lists for issue tracking, and they weren't sufficient.
So several months ago I signed up for FogBugz. FogBugz didn't give me that instant love-at-first-site experience I've had with other software. But as I've begun to use it heavily, I have grown to adore this software, and I now completely rely on it to manage my projects. Its genius is in its maturity. It is mature, seasoned, and polished software that makes tracking multiple issues with difficult sticky elements not just easy, but enjoyable. You know software is great if you still love it, and use it heavily after several months. Now I can't live without it. It allows me to constantly keep on top of the hundreds of issues currently at play with my project, tracking them by sub-project, by team member, priority, and time. I have to say, it has also trained me to work more efficiently in managing my projects. Because it is easy to use, we use it comprehensively, and because of that, it has helped us improve the quality of our software. There are only four of us on our team, I'm sure it would really come into its own with much larger teams, and still be helpful for even smaller teams. My only real complaint is that it's packed with additional features, but they aren't real approachable. The usability, once you get the hang of the features you need, is solid, and even claravoiyant, but beyond that, the other features and capabilities of the software requires some hunting, digging and experimenting to get rolling. Hosted: free for 2 users, or $25/user, per month Installed: $199/user or less Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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ReviewBasics
October 16, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, Collaboration, Design, Free, Hosted software, Productivity, Project managementReviewBasics: Hosted software that allows you to submit, for review by others, a website, an image, a document (Word, PDF, Powerpoint), or a flash video. Others can add comments, drawings, emoticons, text, etc. SharpStyle Labs, Inc. It's an impressive technical accomplishment. It's polished and easy to use. Plus, it offers nice controls for the author: You can have comments visible just to the author, or to all reviewers. You can you write up a set of instructions for your reviewers. It offers a comments history. When done, you can filter all your stuff by date, by reviewer, and by files which have reviewer comments on them. If you need to do asynchronous reviews, and/or if you have a geographically distributed team, this is a great resource. It feels a bit slow (which is probably because it's so rich, so that's forgivable). If you want to submit a website for review, you can't do it as you are creating the workspace (like you can with everything else), you have to create the workspace, then dig around for it (they tell me this is going to be addressed soon). Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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TaskBin
September 18, 2007 in 3 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, Issue trackers, ProductivityTaskBin: It is a group task management tool. It helps you allocate tasks to your team members and is built around the concept of sharing tasks as a group (or groups). All of your tasks are visible to others and can be shared. Other members can add tasks to your plate or edit tasks already there. Mangospring Very smooth interface, attractive, feature-rich, and for a group working on a project, it offers a simple way to share and keep track of tasks. Nifty constructs like softer deadlines (today, tomorrow, next week, sometime soon) introduce an interesting (and more real-world?) way to prioritize tasks. It has a highly annoying construct where it forces you to add first and last name for anyone. None of the marketing pages outline what the "premium" account is, or what it costs. The confirmation link they email you is beastly-long, but not a hyperlink (easy fix, guys!). Free for everything I could find. There's mention of a "premium" account during signup, but I never saw anything else about it. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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PlanHQ
April 24, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, Business Planning, Hosted software, Project managementPlanHQ: Online business planning software. PlanHQ Limited Remember when you were in third grade and you had that math workbook? You may be reluctant to admit it, but it was kinda fun and you even accidentally learned stuff as you hurried to fill it all out. PlanHQ is like your favorite business plan workbook from MBA school. It's greatest benefit is how it challenges you to think through and answer for the whole business picture of your venture. As you're working through your strategy, goals, competitive analysis, market analysis, sales forecasts, etc. it's like having a very detail-oriented MBA coaching you. If you're like most entrepreneurs (one big part passion, and one small part business training) this is an excellent tool to help you get your act together. There are also collaboration features to help investors, partners, and others monitor and participate in the evolution of your venture. Nifty features like the ability to export it all into a Word Doc or PDF, and a report to tell you how complete your plan is are a nice touch. As you use the system, it evolves organically to provide you richer information and business intelligence for making decisions. If you have the discipline to use this software and challenge yourself to account for all the extraneous details we often overlook, you'll be better equipped for success. It's a brilliant bit of software. Intuitive, very well designed, and comprehensive without being overwhelming. I would love to see a "lite" version for free. Something with 1/5th the stuff, just the basics, to get you sold on the value of having the discipline to think everything through. It does shoehorn you a bit into their business philosophy. It's a sound philosophy and not heavy-handed, but you can feel the constraints of their approach keeping you between the lines. From $9 to $49/mo All plans start with a free 30-day trial and you can export it all before you leave. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Highrise
April 3, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, CRM, Hosted "Office", Hosted softwareHighrise: Take a CRM, rip out the extraneous confusing garbage no one uses (or understands), accidentally throw a bit of the baby out with the bathwater, but not enough to break the deal, and you've got Highrise. 37signals, LLC Highrise is extremely clean, immediately understandable, well thought-out and useful. 37signals makes software that I use after the initial infatuation wears off. I'm a regular user of most of their other products (they're best known for Basecamp). After spending a few days with Highrise I'm confident this one's a keeper too. By appearances, they didn't try to emulate a CRM so much as solve the problems folks typically turn to a CRM to solve. The result is an elegant contact and communication manager. I'm using it to keep track of the communication I have (email and phone) with partners and customers. When I'm on a call, I just open it up and take notes as we talk. For email I love how I can BCC (blind carbon copy) an email to my Highrise "drop box" and it will attach that email to the contact to whom I sent it. I can also forward any email I get from a contact to that same address and again it's attached and everything is organized. Outlook remains my cesspool of chaos, Highrise is my clean organized communication headquarters. A little tip: set an Outlook or Gmail rule/filter to auto-forward contacts from specific parties to your Highrise email drop box to make sure nothing gets missed. It also does reminders, to-dos, contacts, and "cases" where you can group and manage all the contacts, notes, and files related to a specific undertaking, or "case." Additionally, while I haven't tested it out yet there are several features for sharing all this information amongst various users. It also supports some ninja moves where you can (for example) forward an email and create a task at the same time based on how you format the email address going to your drop box. Note that there's a version specifically catered to freelancer/solo folks called the "Solo Plan." It's at the bottom of the pricing matrix (and hard to spot). The help section is well done and gave me the answers to all my questions as I ramped up the (very gentle) learning curve. This really is a thing of beauty. Highrise shows its youth. There are a few immature features that I'm sure they'll resolve in time. The software was released on March 20, 2007 and they've already released several new features and re-jigged the subscription plans. It's clear they want to make this work for users. The one disappointing omission I found immediately was the inability to wholesale import my Outlook contacts (note they do allow "vCard" importing which you can do one-at-a-time from Outlook). Outlook can spit out a predictably formatted text file, so I'm guessing (and hoping) they'll add this feature soon. The only big feature I expected but didn't find was a shared calendar. I haven't missed it yet, but when I start sharing this with other users, I would love something to get me away from Microsoft Exchange for that. From free to $150/mo for the motherload Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Fat Free Cart
February 1, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, e-Commerce Solutions, Hosted softwareFat Free Cart: The Fat Free Cart is a simple low-cost shopping cart solution that integrates with PayPal, GoogleCheckout, ClickBank and 2Checkout. It offers secure digital downloads, in addition to offering standard shopping-cart checkout for physical goods including shipping calculation. E-Junkie (they have other great ecommerce offerings too) It's an economical and slick way to integrate a checkout into your site. To get started, you simply register, then drop some HTML code into your site where you want the "add to cart" and the "view cart" buttons -- and it works. The whole thing is very smoothly integrated into your site and your customers don't have to leave until they go to check out. Robin K. the lead developer seems to handle most support requests and is insanely timely and helpful. Including help with getting PayPal and Google Checkout set up properly for easy integration if you need a hand. The Administration interface is very easy to use as well. They layout is clean and everything is intuitive. Even novices can maintain their own shopping cart. In summary: It's an affordable, configurable shopping cart system from a company with a solid reputation of customer support (I had several email to share their positive experiences) and it offers the ability to
sell both digital and physical goods including calculating shipping. If you need a quick, easy, affordable way to sell something off your existing site - this might be the solution for you. Plans start at $5 per month Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Relenta CRM
October 16, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, CRM, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareRelenta CRM: A new CRM tool (customer relationship management). Includes email, contact manager, shared calendar, email newsletter marketing/autoresponders. Relenta They claim, and employ a (now familiar) "Less is more" approach. They call it the "90/10 rule" "Designed for usability and efficiency, Relenta CRM achieves 90 percent of the functionality commonly required by small business users with only ten percent of the application weight." They integrate email, contact management, calendar, and email newsletter marketing software into one application. The free plan offers quite a bit for the starting-out entrepreneur trying to determine if this software is right for them. They've obviously put a great deal of effort into this offering. The interface is attractive and fairly well conceived and it includes many of the features you'd expect from a CRM. It will be interesting to see how it evolves (it needs some maturing still) and how it stands up to the imminent Sunrise (CRM product) from 37signals. A detailed user guide/help/knowledge base is really needed (they are working on it). The support is decent in the meantime (although the support form is cumbersome to fill out). They do have a PDF "user's manual" you'll find in your Relenta inbox after you create an account, which is helpful. They need spell check. HTML email templates would be nice (right now offers only plain-text email) They require 3 credentials for login, not just the normal 2 (i.e. username/password). The initial starting experience still needs some polish. I had that bewildering "what do I do now" moment when I started. The free account allows only one user, but you are offered the form to create another user. Only after you attempt it does the application tell you can't add one ("user limit exceeded"). Then the statistics on my dashboard reported 2 out of 1 user, but I still only had the one. The application response feels a bit sluggish (and no AJAX in sight, which could alleviate some of that feeling). It feels like they may have rushed to launch it. It's certainly usable as it is and (I have reports from a very happy user), and it's an impressive application, but we've come to expect more from web applications in the last couple years, and this one isn't quite there yet. From FREE to $50 per user per month Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Google Docs and Spreadsheets
October 11, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, ProductivityGoogle Docs and Spreadsheets: From Google's acquisition of Writely coupled with Google Spreadsheet comes Google Docs and Spreadsheets. A hosted, Gmail-like service which provides (you guessed it) a hosted document and spreadsheet editor. Just login with your Google/Gmail account to get started. Google Google is hit and miss on interface design (or maybe we just need to get used to their approach). This one is done quite well. The options are simple - and happen to be the only ones I think most of us care about anyway. The upside? No bloated confusing morass of menu options. All your documents are in a nice, clean, hosted centralized location allowing you, or colleagues to access them from anywhere. You can even upload existing doc(Word)/rtf/xls(Excel)/csv etc documents to the repository. The collaboration stuff really is nice. Send invites, track revisions, chat (IM-like, right in the window) while you work together on a doc, etc. (It's similar to Writeboard only with richer collaboration tools). You can also invite folks to view, but not edit. You can also export your creations to common formats (doc/rtf/xls/csv/pdf/html/open office). PDF export is a pretty darn cool feature. Has a very nice spell check. The spreadsheet (doc too?) allows you to autosave periodically to keep you from losing work (nice touch). You can also post word docs to your blog (nice clean drop-down+click setup for Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, SquareSpace, BlogHarbor, Blogware). And you can manually set up other services, including TypePad and Moveable Type, but it takes a bit more finessing. Works in IE and FireFox (haven't tested others, although I suspect all modern browsers work.) I'm not sure how comfortable we'll be having our documents hosted such that without a connection (read: airplane, vacation, etc.) we don't have access to them. Do rich collaboration tools and a hard-drive-crash-resistant hosted repository outweigh the annoyance of that? They are quite simple in functionality - probably 90% of what we all need, that last 10% may be a deal breaker for power users, especially the spreadsheet side. It's not as eerily omniscient as Excel, if you rely on that. Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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