James Little @ NZfusion.com

Part 2 of Distributed Project Management

Free open solutions to managing your online distributed projects, I will discuss the tools we are using in our company (name still pending) and how we are using them. I would also like to know about alternative uses, and software products that people are using for these tasks.

But firstly the situation, we are a company of 3 technically experienced persons, using multiple workspaces to keep in contact and do the research and work activities required. Obviously a lot of information is being created on a local disk, but using a web based solutions means that all of us can access the same information, where ever we are… perhaps in the future we may also be able to access and edit this information from our mobile phones.

Our current online solutions include:

• http://mail.google.com/ gmail for email and chat - that is obviously a no-brainer for most people… free email, almost unlimited space, spell checking, dynamic address look up. But it does drive a lot of our other solution choices, as we all have a google log in, this makes central identity management easy for our documents, blogs and also provides aRSS reader. Gmail provides conversation tracking and updates conversation asynchronously - which is very useful for webbased mail. It also allows chat and as it is web based and mobile friendly, we can check email easily at the airport on a net terminal or mobile phone, no configuration required, except that your mobile connect to the internet.
• Google Docs for web based document and spreadsheet management. If we were all using yahoo mail (with unlimited disk) or something else, then we might have also looked at Zoho documents. What is useful here is that documentation changes are tracked and multiple users can edit the same document… within reason, I believe somewhere around 5 - 10 users can edit the same document? But with our 3 man team, this won’t be an issue until we have money to expand. A document can be created and edited and then uploaded, which is also the case with other tools.
• Zoho Project, which I am still very excited about. We have been able to add in our project milestones, giving ownership to the respective team members and timelines for our objectives. The free version is only limited in the number of projects you can create, allowing you to use the calendar application and set up meetings, even recurring meetings and check out the gantt chart that shows the overall progress of tasks and how they fit together.
• skype - forgot all about this magical invention - free voip, how could we run our projects without it?

I guess that these sort of tools do not seem very spectacular to your typical project management team - what we have here is email, word, spreadsheets and a project management tool. But you would be amazed how much time is saved by being able to access these technologies anywhere and without any configuration, email and rss even works on my cell phone! I suppose I might be able to log into Zoho and get task list on my mobile?

Future web applications that we expect to use:
Wiki - documentation is represented in a paper format, but really information is more versatile. A wiki allows sharing, linking and creating common documents quickly. Some of our current Google documents will possibly be moved to a Wiki, but I don’t think a wiki completely replaces documents, it just makes it easy to reference them. Another strength of Google Docs is the ability to publish documents and reference them online.

Other interesting webbased tools:
emacs web clone: 9ne looks like a really well developed tool, but I can’t remember any of the key mappings anymore.
ecco - this looks like the shizzle of web based ides. But it is only in alpha.
aptana -this is the shizzle of web based ides. Why aren’t any online now? I’d really like access to good web based IDEs.