With the promise of a credit crunch fast approaching, people are starting to tighten their belts. The tech industry can often be one of the first to experience budget cuts and project cancellations but with distributed teams able to work together it doesn’t have to be this way. None of the new collaborations applications cost a fortune and most are free to try/use. The following is a guest post by Jake Stride, md of the Senokian agency which has spun out the TactileCRM suite of tools for small businesses. Customer Management Tools like Relanta, started by the Russian Dmitri Eroshenko, allow you to manage and maintain email across your team, and the US based Highrise and Pipeline Deals, allow you to keep your address book online and manage your sales pipeline. Collaboration With organisations working from disparate locations and the increase of home working, a good group collaboration tool is a must to ensure projects work in a streamlined fashion and that there is no unnecessary time wasted. London based Huddle has an excellent online collaboration tool that offers whiteboards, document management and all the tools you need to keep your team working together. Other solutions are available that meet some of the criteria, but not in one easy to use system. Backpack and hosted SharePoint are others to consider. Meetings For many the World is now their oyster. Dimdim has launched their Open Source meeting platform for easy online meetings with colleagues and clients, as has Adobe Connect. doodle.ch have a great online platform for scheduling meetings and getting everyone together, and the old favourites such as Webex and GoToMeeting can still be useful. Project Management As we found recently there has been much discussion recently in the tech sector about project managment tools. From Chinwag’s uk-netmarketing list, to PHPWM, there are lots of tools available, but none that seem to quite fit everyone’s needs. Huddle’s solution can be a good fit when you need the collaboration tools, and there are offerings from Intervals, ActiveCollab, and Basecamp too. Project Management is one of the few places that people seem to get particularly passionate about solutions that don’t quite fit their needs and one where it is worth spending a bit of time looking into solutions. Support & Customer Service We’ve all heard the adage, it’s easier to keep/upsell to an existing customer than to find a new one. Keeping → Read More

So there have been many attempts to make it easier to collaborate over projects. You’ve got apps that will put yellow stickies onto web pages (like Fleck) and lots of collaboration apps from the likes of Basecamp, Huddle, Sosius and Ximdesk. There is Conceptshare, Octopz, Cozimo, and Thinkature but fe have concentrated on the single core use for many companies, which is just proofing artwork. London-based ProofHQ, in private beta since January, launches today aiming at the UK and US markets specifically for this purpose. I tried out the app and it is pretty slick. The cool thing about the proofs, is that they can be embedded into any web page, so ProofHQ documents can can also be integrated into project management applications like Basecamp or Huddle. It’s designed around the way people currently mark-up proofs because co-founder and CEO Mat Atkinson and his team have a background in this business. He was previously at Workflow Solutions – a specialist pre-press software company. An uploader tool allows users to drag and drop files (up to 75 Mb) from their desktop to the site where ProofHQ creates a Flash-based proof. Comments made from reviewers – clients, co-workers etc – appear alongside one another. You could in theory use ProofHQ inside a traditional (web-based) enterprise application without having to re-tool. The startup is looking to bring in revenues from tiered monthly and annual pricing plans based on the number of end users, number of proofs, and storage per month. But a free account is offered to those who just have five proofs per month. CrunchBase Information ProofHQ Conceptshare Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More