collaboration – nitin badjatia

Task manager and collaboration tool Trello turns a year old today

Having tried nearly every to-list, task manager over the years, I think I’ve finally found one that works for me with Trello. I have stuck to it as my go-to application for managing a wide array of both personal activities and collaboration across groups. Many of the current generation of team collaboration/task management tools provide great flexibility, but the user experience curve is still too high to quickly bring a disparate group of tasks and people together. This is where Trello shines; it is a deceivingly simple application that provides significant horsepower behind the scenes. Trello uses a skeumorphic approach to managing activities, relying on a time-tested approach of ‘boards’ that contain columns of movable ‘cards’. I’ve seen people online refer to this approach as being similar to the Japanese Kanban process used in manufacturing, which I suppose is the inspiration for the application. I can’t really do justice to how the application works here, so I suggest you visit their home page and take a tour.

The main browser-based application (there are iPhone and Android companion apps) displays some of the best web coding I’ve seen. Fog Creek Software, the developer of Trello, is providing enterprise-class horsepower with a consumer level user experience, which is not an easy feat.

Earlier this year, Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, wrote that Trello was designed to be used by a wide variety of people:

The biggest difference you’ll notice … is that Trello is a totally horizontal product.

Horizontal means that it can be used by people from all walks of life. Word processors and web browsers are horizontal. The software your dentist uses to torture you with drills is vertical.

Vertical software is much easier to pull off and make money with, and it’s a good choice for your first startup. Here are two key reasons:

It’s easier to find customers. If you make dentist software, you know which conventions to go to and which magazines to advertise in. All you have to do is find dentists.

The margins are better. Your users are professionals at work and it makes sense for them to give you money if you can solve their problems.

Making a major horizontal product that’s useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. You can’t charge very much, because you’re competing with other horizontal products that can amortize their development costs across a huge number of users. It’s high risk, high reward: not suitable for a young bootstrapped startup, but not a bad idea for a second or third product from a mature and stable company like Fog Creek.

via Joel on Software

Fog Creek is aggressively developing the application, and has recently updated the Trello iPhone companion app (I can’t wait to see a native iPad app!). So, a year in with a horizontal product, Trello marks the milestone with a great statistic:

You’ve made 717,337 accounts. We hit 500,000 in July, so it’s going even faster these days.

via It’s Trello’s Cake Day!

Congratulations to the Trello team for a successful year!

One of these days I may post about my own workflows using Trello, but in the meantime I encourage you check out the application for yourself.

MindMeister updates include Cross-Connections

: Image via Wikipedia

I’m a big fan of mind mapping. For years I used MindJet’s MindManager application, but I’ve since migrated to the cloud based MindMeister. MindMeister is not as robust as MindManager, but it allows for collaborative brainstorming without client-side software. Over the last year or so, MindMeister has grown in capabilities, including offline mind mapping (through Google Gears), but lacked one critical element of useful mind mapping, cross connections. The latest release now incorporates that critical function, in addition to other features:

MindMeister News – Mind Mapping on Steroids

Graphical cross-connections

You can now add graphical cross-connection between your ideas in your mind maps, which will be displayed as green arrows. This feature is still beta, so please be kind. We’ll add more functionality here in future, such as control points and formatting.

MindManager is still more robust than MindMeister, but the later is quickly catching up. Mindjet has also begun to offer an online solution, but I haven’t had the time to review it. Quite frankly, MindMeister does the job for me.

Google Sites follows the release of GrandCentral

Finally the old JotSpot has been released by Google. Google Sites made a big splash yesterday, and by the end of the day most bloggers were complaining about how much JotSpot had been stripped down from the original application. I’ve had a JotSpot account since the early beta days, so when I finally got around last night to accessing Sites, I was also a bit disappointed. Thinking about it again this morning, I realized that – like most everything else Google releases – Sites may be a simplified version of JotSpot, but it still is quite powerful. I know of a few small organizations that I help out that will absolutely love this Google wiki product.

My old JotSpot account still looks and operates the same, and I believe there is a plan to offer optional migration of old JotSpot accounts over to the new Sites. Once I’ve taken a full spin, I’ll post a thorough review of Sites. I’m already getting the feeling that, once I spend some time working with Sites, I’ll like it a lot.

Automattic finds a better way to Twitter

There is some buzz around the announcement of Prologue, Automattic’s – the makers of WordPress – new ‘group twitter’ application. It seems to be more of a presence tool than anything else:

We’re fans of Twitter around here, in fact many Automatticians have accounts, but while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more, like a way for each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.

As you can see on my blog below, I do use twitter from time to time, but I haven’t really found it to be too useful for a business setting. Prologue, however, may open up the possibilities to improve group interaction when dealing with people in disparate settings. There are more than a few people who have already compared Prologue to 37Signals’ Basecamp. I think Basecamp is a more rigid, traditional project management application, but I can see some similarities here.

37Signals’ Backpack gets an update

There are few web 2.0 companies that get as much positive buzz as 37Signals does. For the uninitiated, 37Signals is the company behind some of the more practical web applications and productivity tools available today. One of their most popular applications, Backpack, was recently updated. Essentially, backpack is a light wiki-type application that allows you to create task lists, manage notes, and store files all within a simple/elegant web interface. When first launched a couple of years ago, Backpack received enormous amount of buzz, and helped catapult 37Signals into the web 2.0 mainstream. In recent times, however, Backpack had fallen behind in updates, and quite a few users openly wondered if 37Signals had abandoned the project. While the company might have put Backpack on the back burner, it has re-assumed center stage with some nice tweaks and enhancements to the interface. A complete list of updates can be seen here.

Search, finally

I’ve used Backpack, on and off, since it’s inception. The application is deceptively simple, but can also be very frustrating. One of the major frustrations that drove me away from daily Backpack use was the lack of a search capability. Well, as you can see on the right, that has been corrected. Can you imagine having a central repository of notes, ideas, or tasks that didn’t have any ability to search? Just by adding a search capability, 37Signals has substantially enhanced the usability of Backpack. Search is not perfect, as it only presents back the page on which a searched term resides.

Move stuff around

Another major complaint about Backpack was the inability to move sections (lists, notes, attachments, etc.) from page to page. 37Signals had already incorporated a slick drag-drop capability to move stuff around within a page, but not to other pages. This has now been fixed. Sections can be dragged onto other pages, and sections can be moved about anywhere on a given page. This is really, really nice. One big miss here is that individual list items can’t be moved from page to page. I’d certainly like to see that sometime soon.

There are a bunch of other tweaks worth checking out. Overall, this is a worthy upgrade to Backpack, not a huge improvement, but they’ve addressed many shortcomings in this iteration.

By the way, Satchel users will be happy to hear that the upgrade only caused minor hiccups in the ability to synchronize Backpack with the PalmOS based Satchel.

MindMeister beta invitations for anyone who is interested

Last week, I wrote about a great new online mind mapping tool called MindMeister. Well, as it turns out I have 20 beta invitations to hand out. If you are interested, leave a message on this post (remember to put your correct email address in the email address section), and I’ll send out an invitation.

MindMeister takes mind mapping online

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about a new online brainstorming tool called bubbl.us. That application seemed a little too simple and off the standard mind mapping approach to be of much use to many. A commenter left a note about an online mind mapping application that was closer to traditional tools, known as MindMeister. I signed up for access to the private beta, and was approved within a few minutes. The online tool is still in that private beta stage, but I can tell you that it looks spot on when compared to traditional mind mapping tools.

Mind maps generated inside MindMeister are easy to setup and manage. Maneuvering inside MindMeister is similar to FreeMind and MindManager, although keyboard shortcuts aren’t as intuitive (or similar) to either offline application. Dragging nodes around is identical to offline applications. In fact, it’s easy to forget that MindMeister is an online application. There is version control, allowing you to revert back in a fairly granular fashion.

Like nearly all online applications today, one of the core features of MindMeister is to enable collaboration on maps. A map can be shared in a true collaborative environment or as view only. Another powerful feature of MindMeister is the ability to import FreeMind or MindManager files. This feature alone makes MindMeister incredibly useful. In the private beta, text formating, icons, and fancy layouts of maps are lost during the import process, but all text nodes are retained. Exporting, at the moment, is not as evolved as the application only lets you export as a graphic file or as a bulleted text file in RTF format.

MindMeister is in early stage beta, so I’m sure there will be many improvements along the way. The developers are looking to offer a standard and premium version of the tool at some point, as the ‘my account’ page indicates. Most of the premium features of MindMesiter are available in this beta phase. Overall I’ve been very impressed with the way it handles and feels, and can’t wait to see this application evolve into a full blown mind mapping tool.

Zoho Notebook takes Microsoft OneNote’s appeal online

As you know, I’ve been steadily moving my work habits toward an Office 2.0, work anywhere, approach. One of the more difficult habits to wean myself off of has been using the free-form note-taking capabilities of Microsoft’s OneNote. Zoho’s Notebook, announced today, may make this transition a no-brainer. Jump over to the link to take a look at a great sneak peek video on the site. From the site, here are some highlighted points:

	Intuitive user interface with white boarding and custom layout capability
	Quick “add” buttons for adding text, graphics, photos, audio, video, RSS feeds and documents
	Combine and add Notebook pages from other applications such as Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet
	”Content level” sharing and versioning providing fine grain control of what is shared with others
	Firefox and IE plug-ins for instant web clipping
	Real-time, simultaneous editing and sharing of content
	Skype integration for instant chat and IP telephony

Zoho expects the Notebook to be available to the public by March.

UPDATE:

Marc Orchant and Ismael Ghalimi have had private beta access to Zoho Notebook for a few days. Both concur with my first thoughts that Zoho is quickly becoming a game changer in the Office 2.0 space.

Is JotSpot ready to make its Google debut?

Yesterday, I received several emails from JotSpot stating that they were going to introduce a major upgrade to their service next week. I’ve had an early beta account of JotSpot and have seen it progress nicely into an effective wiki-based collaboration environment. Google acquired JotSpot in October and they have been quiet since then. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch is speculating that this email may signal the relaunch of JotSpot under a Google moniker:

Will JotSpot Relaunch Next Week?

Google sent an email to JotSpot customers notifying them of an upgrade being rolled out over the next week. JotSpot has been closed to new customers since they were acquired by Google in late October 2006, and there has been no word of when JotSpot might be relaunched.

The speculation is that JotSpot’s email may be an indication that their service is now operating within a Google environment and may reopen for new users. I doubt that they totally integrated JotSpot into the myriad other offerings that Google now has under it’s belt. If the speculation is correct, it will be nice to see JotSpot reopened for general use, but I really hope that Google is working to tightly integrate it with Gmail, Docs & Spreadsheets, Calendar, etc. If integrated correctly, this could become a killer online application suite.

So, hopefully the JotSpot upgrade will provide a glimpse into the Googleplex’s long term online application vision….but I won’t be holding my breath.

Related articles by Zemanta