Online Project Management
Sharing documents online
It is sometimes very difficult to persuade colleagues to share documents online when you are working remotely.
Everybody is comfortable with email - logging onto an online project management service appears to be a long winded way of sending a document, or updating the status of a project.
The problem with email - is that everyone has to CC everyone else to stay on top of the status of a project. And when it comes to collaborating on text documents, the marking facilities of MS word can be daunting. Why not have one document in one place where everyone edits the same document - (see the video below).
There are many excellent collaboration tools, but one of the easiest is the totally free Google docs. Have a look at this video to get a quick idea of the benefits.
If everyone were to use Google docs, you could also share calendars and notes, and chat with Gtalk. But the problem is that not everybody has a gmail account (yet), and Google’s free tools are not all on the same page.
A more professional alternative is BaseCamp (free and paid versions).
After logging in, you post messages and comments, upload documents, collaborate on text revision, create to-do lists and chat with members of the team. BaseCamp uses Milestones, essentially a calendar which can have to-do lists and messages associated with each item. It’s a bit like a private blog where everyone invited is on the same page (literally). The only problem with BaseCamp is that it may take a few hours for technophobe’s to get up to speed (but its not complicated).
A simple alternative I have been using for years for managing website’s, is a private Wordpress blog for all the editors. Upload documents, make posts about text changes or let each other know what you are thinking. A supervisor can then keep an eye on the overall project, and any revision requests will be visible to anyone visiting the blog. No need for endless CC’d emails.
One of the beauties of the Wordpress blog approach is the bookmarklet widget for editing a web site.
Drag a link (the widget) into your bookmarks from the control panel. Now if you want some text edits done on the site, highlight the text in question, and click the bookmark. A new blog post will be made in the maintenance blog, with the highlighted text already filled in. Now copy this text and past it just below, then make your text changes to the copied text - et viola. A new post is made with a link to the page in question and the text edits all ready for approval. Anybody else who wants to make revisions can do so in the comments.
Wordpress uses categories for each post. So if you set up the default as “edit” and perhaps a few others such as “approved” “urgent” and “completed”. The webmaster can then go ahead with any edits to the site after they reach a certain status and mark them as “completed” when the site has been updated. Everybody knows what’s going on.
Not quite as sophisticated as the BaseCamp approach, but not too complicated for the tech-shy editor who doesn’t want direct access to the content management system or an editor who has to go through an approval process.
One disadvantage of this approach over BaseCamp, is that a Wordpress blog will need two sets of logins to make it totally private. One to get past any security features and another to log into your blog account. Sometimes this is too much for the busy editor without a password management tool.
Tags: BaseCamp, documents, Google, project management, widget, Wordpress