The features offered to customers through the iPhone app includes:

• Projects – view, edit, create and delete
• Tasks – view, edit, create and delete
• Groups – view, edit, create and delete
• Messages – view, edit, create and delete
• Progress notes – view, edit, create and delete
• Files – view
• My Stuff – view
• Active only – filter
• Users – filter

Whilst the iPhone app is a native app, customers with other types of smartphone can still use the mobile web version of the application, 5pm Mobile Edition.

To access the new release, please download it from iTunes here.

More on 5pm

5pm™ is a project management application that is accessed via the cloud and aims to promote project team collaboration in a way that is simple and effective.  With a comprehensive range of functions, 5pm helps is customers store and share information on projects, tasks, notes and supporting documentation.  In addition, tracking progress, managing time, sending automatic notifications and reporting makes 5pm a comprehensive tool for any organization, small or large to manage its day to day project operations.  Its interface is colorful and easy to use, so team members can be up and running quickly with little or no training needed.

5pm comes in a variety of languages to support multi-lingual operations.  With the ability to export information out to CSV files, sharing information beyond the bounds of 5pm is simple.  Inbuilt report generation lets users define and store their own reports to suit their needs.

14 day, fully featured free trial to let users try the product out and see the real benefits before committing to a regular monthly subscription. For more information, please see: www.5pmweb.com.

th

The conference is attended by companies small and large and previous events have included representation from some digital giants, including, Canon, Xerox, and Siemens.

At this year’s event, Teamlab is preparing to announce their preview version of its Online Document Editor, which it insists is a completely innovative solution, as the only fully featured editor of its kind.

The Teamlab team are also looking forward to the opportunity to meet and talk face to face with its users who support the application and, with this in mind, are offering 20 personal eTickets to CEBIT 2012.  For a chance of visiting this prestigious event, Teamlab are asking its customers to submit a success story on Teamlab and their organization.  The team are happy to take these success stories in any language.  Stories can be submitted either through their blog or Facebook page, adding the tag: “I want to go to CeBIT 2012”

The results of the contest will be announced on 18^th February, giving plenty of time for the winners to plan and prepare for their trip to the event!

More on CeBIT 2012

CeBIT is the largest international event for those involved in the fast-moving, digital industry and offers a comprehensive mixture of exhibition, conferences, keynotes, corporate events and lounges, as well as the general opportunity for valuable networking to help promote and seal new business.

For more information on CeBIT, 2012,please see: http://www.cebit.de/home

More on Teamlab

TeamLab, as a product was developed by a company called Ascensio Systems Limited.  It  is a collaborative project and business management solution that is accessed via the cloud and its key purpose is the combine social networking with the principles of effective project management to help teams work together irrespective of geography.  Teamlab is, essentially a free application and for those who need more than its standard functionality, additional, more advanced features are available for a paid subscription.

For more information on Teamlab or to sign up, please see: www.teamlab.com

Today’s web environments, however, have alleviated many of those problems, with the introduction of Chrome seeing automatic updating of browsers, allowing users to keep with the development curve without even needing to know what version they are on!

Other browsers that have followed the Chrome suit in providing automatic updates is Firefox and Safari.

37signals reports that more than forty percent of Basecamp users are using Chrome and, further, that a total of ninety-seven percent are distributed over three different versions.   Firefox has a third of Basecamp users with Safari representing the third largest browser for Basecamp users, having around thirteen percent of the user base.  In fact, Internet Explorer has only eleven percent of Basecamp users, but these users are spread across a range of different versions of the browser, with a large number of this percentage still working on  IE7, a browser that is over five years old.

The remaining percentage of Basecamp users are on what 37signals would call ‘undesirables’ in terms of browser type and version and these take a significant amount of development and support effort!

With this in mind, 37signals have decided to set a higher bar for browsers for Basecamp Next, to include:

• Chrome 7 and later
• Firefox 4 and later
• Safari 4 and later
• Internet Explorer 9 and later

So, the seven percent of Basecamp users that are using the ‘undesirables’ will need to upgrade their browser to be able to make use of Basecamp Next, allowing 37signals to phase out support for the older browsers and focus their development efforts in making Basecamp offer the best interface, functionality and usability that it can.  Of course, the classic version of Basecamp will continue to operate and be available to those users that simply can’t upgrade their browser.

More on Basecamp

Basecamp is an online project management application that is delivered as a subscription based, on demand, service to help project teams work in a collaborative and centralized way.  With functionality covering task and milestone management, reporting, resource allocation, centralized document storage, writeboards, to name but a few, Basecamp offers a complete solution for both large and small organizations and is well worth sampling through its free trial.

The new improved custom fields, however, change all that and see the custom fields bedding into WORKetc with the other integrated features, both in terms of the user interface and the supporting functionality.

A custom field in WORKetc is a way of storing specific information for your specific needs – consider a custom field much like a specific field in a database that meets your organization’s specific needs.  Once captured, this customized information can also be used and displayed within your work area of WORKetc, providing valuable and relevant information for your project team.  For example, imagine your business sells website design and creation to customers. Additional useful information might be: whether they want to use one of your standard design templates or a custom site, the specific design template used for the site, do they need a backend database? Will they take online payments?  These pieces of information all represent useful but very custom information, and these are ideal candidates to be captured using custom fields in WORKetc.

The key improvement that users will now see include:

• The ability to assign a newly created group of custom fields to a particular module
• The setup of custom fields is now much simpler
• The ability to perform searches on custom fields
• Make use of pre-defined types of custom groups, for example, lists
• The ability to expand text fields. In fact, this small change was actually introduced last year, but only those users using the forums would have known about it as it wasn’t more widely announced.  This feature lets users expand the text using the grab handle on the bottom right hand corner, then dragging it out to give you extra text space!

For each individual custom field, there are its own set of options allowing you to tailor them. For example, a label custom field, can be color coded.  The custom field group is only displayed on the chosen activities, allowing you to perform actions on the group as a whole – potentially saving huge amounts of time.

The release of WORKetc that will include the new Custom Field Group functionality is due to arrive with customers in February, 2012.

For more information on WORKetc, and to sign up for a free trial, please visit: www.worketc.com

The new Online Translation System has been designed to simply the previous translation process, making it much easier for people to contribute.

In total, TeamLab has sixty two people who contribute regularly to language translation activity and feedback and ideas from these contributors has led to some more recent improvements in the Translation System.   A new release of the Online Translation System now sees these improvements in place and available to its users, making their translation task even easier.

So, what are the enhancements that users can now expect to see?

• User Interface:
• The design of the login screen has been updated to reflect that of the usual TeamLab portal login screen, now giving a consistent look and feel.
• Often contributors in the Online Translation System have different passwords for different parts of TeamLab. A new logout link makes switching between these much easier.
• The drop-down for translation projects has moved to the modules for the project that is active.
• A new tab has been added for the search feature allowing users to swap quickly between searching and translation.

• Translator Assistance Tools:
• To help with the translation from English into another specific language, the Bing service has been included to give an alternative translation.
• A ‘get link’ button lets users copy a link to a key, about which there is a translation query, in the Translation System so the TeamLab team can respond.

As always TeamLab are looking to expand on their community of language translation contributors, whether for an entirely new translation or to help perfect an existing translation, and are welcoming new applications to join. To express your interest, you can contact the support team at: documentation@teamlab.com.

For more information on TeamLab, its functionality and details on how to sign up, please visit: www.teamlab.com.

Lessons learned offer us a valuable opportunity to take previous experience and modify our approach such that we avoid some of the pitfalls that can be anticipated and handled before they have a negative effect on our progress.  Unfortunately, often in the drive to see a project complete, the incorporation of lessons learned is often omitted from the overall project management process.  There are two aspects to lessons learned that need to be addressed within projects, ideally:

a)    Incorporate previous lessons into a current or planned project

b)    Capture lessons from a current project

Overlooking lessons within the project process should really be seen as a waste of both time and resources.  You wouldn’t waste money buying the same reference book time and again, everytime you need to use it – you would simply refer back to the original!  Why continually make the same mistakes if the learning, simply captured and shared, can avoid this? 

Where organizations do make an effort to capture lessons, many of these are often lost in individual storage areas, stored in different formats (spreadsheets, databases) rather than in a single consistent form – making them difficult then to search and disseminate appropriately.

Lessons learned within projects will often not be captured for a number of different reasons:

• Capturing lessons is often viewed as an additional task that needs to be resourced and has no direct benefit to the current project.
•  The process for capturing and sharing lessons learned is not embedded within the project approach for an organization, so teams often don’t realize they should be carrying this out!

A successful lessons learned process will be embedded as an integral part of an organization’s project management approach and will cover:

•  The effective capture of lessons at the right level of detail
• Appropriate categorization and storage of lessons in a repository that is accessible to all who need it
• Communications around lessons, for example, notification to the appropriate recipients on updates to the lessons learned

Project management is supported widely with online applications such as, Basecamp, WORKetc, 5pm and many others in this space, but none of these applications explicitly cater for effective lessons learned as an integral part of the overall management process.  Whilst many offer a wiki-type feature which, of course, could be used to capture lessons, perhaps these online project management tools should look to introduce some specific functionality that will help encourage the successful capture and sharing of lessons, as a part of best practice in project management.

Huddle has recently announced that, as part of its commitment in supporting not for profit organizations, it has now extended its Donation Program, to allow these organizations to make effective use of their online application to support their fund raising teams, their volunteers and staff within their distributed offices.

Applying organizations will need to meet some eligibility criteria, for example, organizations that are concerned with the following may be able to receive a free Huddle account:

• Relief to the poor
• Advancement of social and community welfare
• Advancement of culture
• Advancement of the natural environment
• Other purposes beneficial to the community
• Humanitarian assistance and disaster relief organizations
• Health services & related activities
• Some religious organizations, registered as a charity

Those successful in securing a free account under the Huddle Donation Program will benefit from the following:

• Ability to register up to 25 Huddle users
• 10Gb central storage space for uploading documents and files
• An unlimited amount of Huddle workspaces
• Task management functionality
• Use of whiteboards functionality
• Use of discussion forums
• Mobile applications
• Ability to integrate telephone and online conferencing
• Microsoft Office plugins

Those interested in applying for a Huddle package as a part of the not for profit Donation Progam, should see: http://www.huddle.com/foundation/ for full information on the program and application criteria.  Applications are invited from organizations world-wide with the process being slightly different for US-based organizations, UK-based organizations and then organizations in the rest of the world.

For not for profit organizations that have needs greater than those included in the Donation Progam, discounted Huddle packages are also available.  A discount of 25 %  is available to such organizations, subject to them meeting eligibility criteria, on the usual Huddle pricing.  Organizations interested in the discounted packages should contact: foundation@huddle.com for more information.

For more information on the Huddle application, its functionality and general pricing, please see: www.huddle.com.

So, where does Huddle fit into this?

The rise of the internet to its current proportions has seen the proliferation of applications that are offered as on-demand services, where customers, whether organizations or individuals, have access to their information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across different time zones.  Huddle is one such application and it is proud to introduce its Unlimited Enterprise offering into the market. Its aim is to recognize the enterprise needs of its customers, allowing an additional range of users to be added to their accounts to allow for true collaboration across their entire stakeholder range.  These new ‘lite’ users are then able to access the appropriate Huddle account on a more occasional basis to their full counterparts, letting them see and comment on the information they need, without the need to have the full access that other organizational users need.  As an added bonus, these Lite users are added free of charge to the account holder!

More about Huddle

Huddle offers comprehensive collaborative project management functionality.  With central and secure storage, documents and files  can be shared across interested users from a single online source so users can be sure they are accessing the most up to date information.  Of course, no online project management application is complete without the standard task and resource management features and Huddle does these well, with useful filtering and built in automatic reminders.  Collaboration is facilitated through a range of different means, including discussion threads, online whiteboards for note taking and the ability to attach comments to different Huddle elements, such as, tasks and documents. With versions being supported for both documents and whiteboards, users are clearly able to keep track any changes.  Huddle also offers an online meetings facility, saving users from having to use a service external to their project management application.

In addition, the look and feel of the Huddle interface can be customized to match an organization’s own brand.

For more information on huddle, please visit: www.huddle.com

The guarantee has come on the back of the widely publicised and damaging outages suffered by Google and Microsoft, in 2011, where their customers couldn’t access their information for frustrating and valuable hours.

Huddle has recognized that today’s project teams are working in a widely distributed way, separated by geography, time zones, and language, all working with different technologies, for example, some desktop, some mobile and any down time can be very costly for businesses who rely on immediate access to their information. 

Huddle sees themselves as now setting the reliability and availability standard for the online project management industry and to help increase customer confidence, ongoing into the future.  To back this up, the team at Huddle has a first-class disaster recovery program that ensures failover to a second data center in the event of a service interruption, for example, as a result of a natural disaster or technical failure.  The maximum failover time to the second data center is a mere 15 minutes!  Huddle’s second data center mirrors the primary data center in real time so customers can be confident that, even in the event of the worst type of electronic catastrophe, their information is secure and any losses will be minimized.

This money-back guarantee added to the level of security offered by Huddle, as a product, makes this application an attractive consideration for organizations that need to be sure their information is both available and safe. Backed by corresponding functionality covering centralised document storage and management, task and milestone management, assignment and management of resources, reporting, calendar and event management, to name but the key areas, Huddle offers an enterprise solution to suit most organizations.

Huddle offers a range of pricing options each tailored individually to suit specific organizational requirements, and for information, contact their sales team at sales@huddle.com.  In addition, a free trial is available.

For more information on huddle and its True Uptime guarantee, please visit: www.huddle.com.

The changes they are introducing include a major update to one of the key Javascript libraries that they are using. These libraries give developers access to pre-written pieces of functionality that they can use in developing Apollo further. As with upgrading software applications to bring in new improvements, upgrading development libraries can see the introduction of improved performance by carrying out back end processes in a quicker and more efficient way.  The team at Apollo rightly points out that there is a mountain of code involved in the application so upgrading the library is not simply a case of slotting the new one in place and testing it – a good deal of detailed and manual work within the code is needed to make sure that the new library integrates correctly.

So what will the user see as a result of this Javascript library upgrade?  The change will be the introduction of support for Internet Explorer 9, which is coming in response to a number of user feedback requests.  Also evident to users will be some improved features around the upload of files.  Perhaps more importantly, though, the upgrade to the new library will make the code behind Apollo more durable, ongoing.

About Apollo

Apollo is a project management tool that is available over the cloud.  Its aim is to support its users in working collaboratively with support for projects, tasks, contacts, calendars amongst other things, in a market place that is competitive.

Apollo comes in different price ranges, covering:

• $23 per month, giving 18 projects, 5Gb storage, unlimited project users, 7 CRM users, 5000 contacts, 12 deals and time tracking
• $48 per month, giving 40 projects, 15Gb storage, unlimited project users, 18 CRM users, 20000 contacts, unlimited deals and time tracking
• $98 per month, giving 115 projects, 30Gb storage, unlimited project users, 40 CRM users, 30000 contacts, unlimited deals and time tracking
• $148 per month, giving unlimited projects, 75Gb storage, unlimited project users, unlimited CRM users, 50000 contacts, unlimited deals and time tracking

Apollo is proving itself as a comprehensive application that has much to offer businesses of all sizes and is well worth considering.

For more information on Apollo, please visit: http://www.apollohq.com/.