I caught the announcement of a new addition to the Zoho productivity suite on TechCrunch and have had a few minutes to play with it over the last 24 hours. Zoho Projects is an online project mangement tool that helps project managers and / or project teams to easily organize their work & track progress. The only issue of note in the blogosphere seems to be questioning the Zoho strategy of building a feature rich application.
I found the product to be intuitive, which is good as there doesn't seem to be any "how to" documentation so far, other than a product tour quicktime movie. Robin Good at MasterNewMedia has taken the quicktime movie and added a voice over, the resultant screencast is being hosted at YouTube.
In short order I was able to:
- customise my settings, set up a project and add users (project team members)
- add tasks and milestones
- schedule a project meeting (with the application handling notication of the participants)
- upload documents connected with the project and have the application handle version control
- submit a timesheet for the hours expended against a task
- look at an overview of my project on a calendar or dashboard
I'm most impressed. What a great collaboration tool for projects. I also found it very stable for a beta release.
Even better, the product is free for one project. Zoho intend to have plans ranging from free (for one project) up to an enterprise plan (unlimited projects, $80/month).
I definitely recommend it.
Tags: Zoho Projects
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Magazine 2.0 Wars
Kent Newsome has written a very funny, tongue in cheek, post about the MySpace plan to launch a magazine.
Then he gone and done it, by launching Newsome.Org, the magazine. In true Web 2.0 tradition today I'm launching Newson.Net, the competition; with more features, more gossip , more naked pictures of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, but absolutely no business model.
I'll certainly shift more copies than Kent's overpriced Newsome.Org, but will it get me any morepublicity links?
Here's issue one...
Then he gone and done it, by launching Newsome.Org, the magazine. In true Web 2.0 tradition today I'm launching Newson.Net, the competition; with more features, more gossip , more naked pictures of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, but absolutely no business model.
I'll certainly shift more copies than Kent's overpriced Newsome.Org, but will it get me any more
Here's issue one...
Tags: Kent Newsome, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Dave Winer, Chris Pirillo, Hugh Macleod
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Collaboration
I picked up on Boing Boing that Google has finally gotten around to re-launching Writely. I may be wrong but I have the feeling that the timing is not unconnected with the recent launch of Live Writer. So I get to write this post on Writely and test out it's ability to function as a blogging tool. Unlike Live Writer, blog posting is not the primary function of Writely so the first thing that becomes obvious is that it's not as WYSIWYG as Live Writer. The second thing I picked up is the absence of a tag generator for Technorati. Whilst I have this functionality in Live Writer as a result of a plugin at least I have the functionality.
On the plus side for Writely, it's internet based rather than desktop based, so I can get at documents anywhere. And then, like Google Spreadsheets, it comes with collaboration tools built in, although chat is missing. I seem to have been looking at a lot of collaborative tools recently including MindManager, Webex, GoToMeeting, Google Spreadsheets and now Writely. So I'm feeling in collaborative mood. Anyone want to write a book?
Update: When I posted to my blog from Writely, the document title didn't transfer as the post title and I can't immediately see why not.
Verdict: For now I'm going to stick with Live Writer as my blog authoring tool, but I suspect Google will not let the challenge of Live Writer go unanswered for long. I will, however, check out Writely in a bit more detail as a collaborative document authoring tool.
P.S. Techmeme and TechCrunch seem to be a bit behind on the story of the re-launch. Maybe it's because it's Sunday or is everyone TechCrunched?
Tags: Writely, Live Writer
On the plus side for Writely, it's internet based rather than desktop based, so I can get at documents anywhere. And then, like Google Spreadsheets, it comes with collaboration tools built in, although chat is missing. I seem to have been looking at a lot of collaborative tools recently including MindManager, Webex, GoToMeeting, Google Spreadsheets and now Writely. So I'm feeling in collaborative mood. Anyone want to write a book?
Update: When I posted to my blog from Writely, the document title didn't transfer as the post title and I can't immediately see why not.
Verdict: For now I'm going to stick with Live Writer as my blog authoring tool, but I suspect Google will not let the challenge of Live Writer go unanswered for long. I will, however, check out Writely in a bit more detail as a collaborative document authoring tool.
P.S. Techmeme and TechCrunch seem to be a bit behind on the story of the re-launch. Maybe it's because it's Sunday or is everyone TechCrunched?
Tags: Writely, Live Writer
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Curiosita
Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a fan of MindManager. Mindjet (the makers of MindManager) recently hosted a Webinar delivered by Michael Gelb, author of "How to think like Leonardo da Vinci".
The resources from that webinar are now available online.
Michael theorises that there are seven principles to thinking like Leonardo. The first of these is "Curiosita", which roughly translates as an insatiably curious approach to life. One way that Leonardo manifested this principle was in his notebooks. Leonardo carried a notebook with him at all times, so that he could jot down ideas, impressions and observations as they occurred. The process of note taking was of great importance to Leonardo.
Eighteen sheets of Leonardo's notebooks were purchased by Bill Gates for 30.8 million dollars in November 1994.
If there is a connection between this post and my last one, perhaps blogging actually represents a desire to share our insatiable curiosity with each other. If Leonardo was alive today I believe he would certainly be a blogger and probably a mind mapper.
Tags: Mindjet, MindManager, Michael Gelb, Leonardo da Vinci, blogs, blogging
The resources from that webinar are now available online.
Michael theorises that there are seven principles to thinking like Leonardo. The first of these is "Curiosita", which roughly translates as an insatiably curious approach to life. One way that Leonardo manifested this principle was in his notebooks. Leonardo carried a notebook with him at all times, so that he could jot down ideas, impressions and observations as they occurred. The process of note taking was of great importance to Leonardo.
Eighteen sheets of Leonardo's notebooks were purchased by Bill Gates for 30.8 million dollars in November 1994.
If there is a connection between this post and my last one, perhaps blogging actually represents a desire to share our insatiable curiosity with each other. If Leonardo was alive today I believe he would certainly be a blogger and probably a mind mapper.
Tags: Mindjet, MindManager, Michael Gelb, Leonardo da Vinci, blogs, blogging
Dry Spell
I haven't written to my blog recently and this afternoon I've been pondering on the reasons for that.
I have been busy at work, climbing a learning curve with a new project, but it's more than that. As I have been so busy I have fallen a little behind with my blog reading but not by much, and by the end of the weekend I'll have caught up even if with some feeds I will achieve inbox zero by judicious use of the delete key.
It's not that I haven't had anything to say, because like most people I tend to have an opinion on lots of things. I do feel that I haven't had anything particularly worthwhile to say and contributing to the echo chamber by regurgitating the efforts of others doesn't hold much appeal as a route to overcoming a dry spell. I've asked myself whether it's procrastination and that isn't what's going on. It does , however, feel like I've fallen off the bandwagon so this post is an attempt to dust myself down and get back in the saddle.
Being a bit of a geek it helped that I had a new toy to try out to write this post with. Yep, I wrote this post with Live Writer and I'm indebted to Kent Newsome for the pointers to Live Writer plugins. My preliminary take on Live Writer is that the setup and configuration is very smooth and it's great to finally blog using a WYSIWYG approach.
If you stop by, please leave me a comment, I could do with the encouragement. If you're feeling really generous, a link would be nice too!
Tags: blogs, blogging, procrastination, inbox zero, echo chamber
I have been busy at work, climbing a learning curve with a new project, but it's more than that. As I have been so busy I have fallen a little behind with my blog reading but not by much, and by the end of the weekend I'll have caught up even if with some feeds I will achieve inbox zero by judicious use of the delete key.
It's not that I haven't had anything to say, because like most people I tend to have an opinion on lots of things. I do feel that I haven't had anything particularly worthwhile to say and contributing to the echo chamber by regurgitating the efforts of others doesn't hold much appeal as a route to overcoming a dry spell. I've asked myself whether it's procrastination and that isn't what's going on. It does , however, feel like I've fallen off the bandwagon so this post is an attempt to dust myself down and get back in the saddle.
Being a bit of a geek it helped that I had a new toy to try out to write this post with. Yep, I wrote this post with Live Writer and I'm indebted to Kent Newsome for the pointers to Live Writer plugins. My preliminary take on Live Writer is that the setup and configuration is very smooth and it's great to finally blog using a WYSIWYG approach.
If you stop by, please leave me a comment, I could do with the encouragement. If you're feeling really generous, a link would be nice too!
Tags: blogs, blogging, procrastination, inbox zero, echo chamber
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