Six alternative tools for small business collaboration

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For small businesses today, there’s nothing that can’t be done in the cloud. You could plunk down your cash for Basecamp, Yammer, and Google Docs like everyone else, but alternatives to these stalwarts abound. For something that does more, costs less—or both—check out these six Web-based tools, categorized based on their primary functionality.

Podio may still fly under the radar of such behemoths as Basecamp, but it’s rapidly emerging as the go-to collaboration tool for a new generation of knowledge workers. Originally a Danish startup, Citrix acquired it last year, and the new features keep on coming.

Podio’s marketplace of specialized apps lets you customize workspaces to your business’s needs.

Designed (like most collaboration systems) to eliminate excessive emailing, the structure is relatively simple: You invite employees into Podio’s internal communication network, then create any number of “workspaces” in which they can collaborate. You can admit outsiders on a workspace-by-workspace basis, keeping them out of the broader employee network.

The centerpiece of Podio actually isn’t its basic collaboration and project management system, but rather its innovative use of apps. Podio’s built-in marketplace includes thousands of highly specialized apps for just about every type of management need: property management, managing an art studio, even structuring the due diligence process when acquiring a company. A couple of clicks, and you can transform Podio from a general project-management tool into a highly focused one.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: Free for up to 5 users, then $9 per user per month.

For those of us in the service or consulting industry, simply managing active projects is only part of the puzzle. Keeping track of various clients, tracking your hours, collecting subcontractor timesheets, and managing retainers and invoicing all take up loads of time probably better spent doing other things.

AffinityLive builds a central database from which you can easily track your client activity. 

To get you started, AffinityLive gathers your email, address books, and calendar (from Google, Office 365, or Exchange) and builds a central database of all your clients. From here you can manage the way you interact with them. Each client gets its own activity stream, and incoming messages are automatically imported into the tool. As contacts progress from prospects to active clients, they’re updated and tracked in the system.

The free version doesn’t do much. It’s basically just a glorified contact database system. You’ll need to pony up $29 per user, per month to incorporate your calendar, do workflow management (including timesheet reports), and access CRM activities like preparing and sending quotes. Higher-end features like managing service contracts, tracking retainer usage, and dealing with recurring or auto-renewing invoices are available in a version costing $59 per user, per month.

No mobile apps (but site is mobile-friendly).

Pricing: Free to $59 per user per month, depending on features desired.

Wiki-building services have a reputation for being complex, messy, and driven more by code jockeys than end users. With many services, initial configuration can be tedious to the point where the idea of starting a wiki is abandoned altogether, let alone creating and managing the database itself.

HackPad’s clean, intuitive interface streamlines the process of creating wikis.

None of that is true with Hackpad. This dead-simple wiki manager can be mastered in a matter of minutes. Creating your wiki takes just a few steps (you get your own keyword.hackpad.com domain name). You can invite collaborators or leave it open to the public to edit. Click the (+) button to create a new document. Multiple users can edit in real time, and a sidebar on the left indicates who wrote what. It’s all very intuitive, simple, and well organized. If you want to get fancy, you can use it to create checklists, drop in videos or pictures, or write code in a communal development environment.

Public sites created with Hackpad are free. Private wikis are free for 30 days or up to five users (whichever happens last). After that you pay a measly $2 per user per month—which also gets you access to premium support. If wikis are in your wheelhouse, it’s an amazing value.

No mobile apps.

Pricing: Free for up to five users, then $2 per user per month.

For talking to your mom, Skype is fine, as is the occasional overseas call on your laptop or mobile device. But serious videoconferencing or telepresence is another thing altogether. If you have two offices on opposite sides of the country—or the globe—keeping the team working together can be a big challenge. This impacts many more small businesses than you’d think: Companies that rely on pockets of operating groups located all over the place are becoming increasingly common.

Mezzanine lets videoconferencing participants use their own devices to share content, apps, and ideas across multiple screens.

Oblong is the company that’s bringing videoconferencing into the ’10s. Imagine a bank of large-screen monitors in your conference room connected via the Internet to a similar bank at your satellite office. Full-screen video is beamed in both directions, and both sides can work on a shared whiteboard, present their own content, or share apps. All of this is controlled via the participants’s mobile devices, a Web browser, or a spatially-aware “magic” wand that’s a bit like a Nintendo Wii controller. Oblong is now working on a version of its system that works with nothing but hand gestures, but that still seems to be a few years off.

It’s pretty cool stuff, and that’s not surprising: The developer consulted on the seminal film Minority Report. To be sure, this kind of technology doesn’t come cheap (pricing isn’t disclosed, but it’ll definitely cost more than a webcam). Still, while Mezzanine may not be in reach of every small business, those with serious distances to cross might find it worth at least getting a demo. For the rest of us, it’s a tantalizing glimpse into what the future of collaboration is probably going to look like.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: Not disclosed.

Social networking is popular enough that savvy businesses are considering a Facebook-like system for their employees. But it needs to be private. After all, you can’t have them updating their resumes on LinkedIn all day when they should be doing their jobs.

Bitrix24 should feel natural for users of popular social media platforms.

Yammer has long been the standard for private social networks, but Bitrix24 is also worth a spin. It’s got some extra features and may be less expensive, depending on how large your company is.

For starters, Bitrix24.looks a lot like your standard social network, offering each user a news feed/activity stream, private conversations (you’re supposed to talk about work), messaging, and photo galleries. There’s even a “like” button, which Bitrix24 uses to influence the way search results are organized. As a lighthearted motivation tool, you can set up badges that managers can hand out to workers in exchange for a job well done.

PacBitrix24, based in Eastern Europe, also has integrated project management features, so you can forgo a separate tool if you use it for workflow and to-do lists. All of this is included in the system for a flat monthly fee. Unlike most cloud-based services, Bitrix24 is all-you-can-eat for most installations: $99 per month for the Standard plan, or $199 for the Professional plan, which adds a records management and a scheduling system, among other tools.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: Free up to 12 users/5GB, then $99 to $199 a month.

There’s no shortage of cloud-based productivity apps, from the venerable Google Docs to HyperOffice to Zoho. Surprisingly, the most capable of the bunch might now be Microsoft Office 365, the Web-based version of the industry-standard Office software.

Office 365 brings all the functionality of Microsoft Office to the cloud, making it a more business-ready alternative to Google Docs.

Office 365 works in tandem with the offline version of its software, but it’s also fully capable in its browser-only incarnation. If you know how to use Office, you know how to use Office 365. As with buying Office for offline use, how much you pay is determined by how sophisticated your business needs are. The bare minimum, at $5 per month per user, gets you Web-only access to the system. Bumping up to $12.50 per month per user gets you desktop versions of most apps, plus Office Mobile for your smartphones, for a maximum of 25 users. At $15 per month you get Microsoft InfoPath added to the mix, plus support for businesses up to 300 employees in size.

Designed with multiple users in mind, users can work on a document simultaneously, and the included email handling tools bring Exchange-class administration to small businesses that wouldn’t normally be able to afford a mail server. Sure, it’s hard to describe anything from Microsoft as “alternative,” but it’s easily worth a look in an increasingly Google-run world.

Mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Pricing: $5 to $15 per user per month.

HackPad Simple-to-use real-time wiki Hackpad has innovative features and a free plan.

Download Now

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To improve collaboration within teams: adding notifications to your access-2013 Web applications

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Access 2013 web apps are great for collaborating around a common set of data. When people work together in this way, the changes that one person makes to the data often require the attention of someone else.

For example, if a small team is working together to track and process maintenance requests, an Access app would be an ideal place to centrally track those requests and their status. Further, imagine that I process a maintenance request and assign it to another team member who needs to take action on it. But how does he or she know? Wouldn't it be great to be automatically informed? That's what notifications can do.

In this article, we'll describe a technique to build e-mail notifications into your Access 2013 web app using the power of SQL Server and a third-party service called Zapier.

In the above example of our maintenance request tracker, people need to get an e-mail when a maintenance request is assigned to them, letting them know of a required action. In the Maintenance Requests table, there's an Assigned To field that is a lookup to the Employees table. Whenever that field changes, an e-mail should be sent to the person to whom the Request is now assigned.

Building this notification functionality involves three steps, detailed further below:

Create a Messages table in the Access web app to store notification emails that you want to send.Create a data macro on the "Maintenance Requests" table that adds records to the Messages table whenever the "Assigned To" field changes.Configure Zapier to automatically monitor the "Messages" table and send an email whenever it detects a new record.

By the end, you'll have something that looks like this:

First, you'll need to create a Messages table to store information about the email notifications that you want to send. This table will need to have fields that specify all the details about the email message, including:

Click on Create > Table in the ribbon, then select the add a new blank table link. Add fields in the table designer so that it looks like this:

You want messages to be sent whenever the Assigned To field changes in a record on the Maintenance Requests table. Data Macros are the perfect tool for the job. Data macros are commands that run whenever records on a table change. For a given table, you can write macros that run when records are added, deleted, or updated. In our case, you'll want to write an On Update macro on the Maintenance Requests table.

To do this, first, open the Maintenance Requests table in the table designer, go to the Design tab, and click Events > On Update.

You'll only want to send the notification if the Assigned To field has changed. To do this, use an If statement that compares the old value of this field with its new value:

If that condition is true, you'll want the macro to create a record in the Messages table. Since you'll want this new Messages record to have the users' e-mail address in the To field, you need to first look that up and store it in a variable:

Finally, use this email address to create the message:

Then, this macro will add a new record to the Messages table whenever the Assigned To field of a record in the Maintenance Requests table changes.

Since, in this example, you also want people to get notifications when a new Maintenance Request is created and assigned to them, you'll create an After Insert macro that looks like this:

The only difference here is that we've changed the If expression at the beginning to run the macro if the Assigned To field is not blank.

Zapier is a third-party tool that you can use to build simple connections between one service, like an Access 2013 web app, and another, like email. Zapier calls these connections "Zaps." To get started building our zap, go to zapier.com and sign up for a free trial account, and click Create New Zap

You'll then find the services that you'd like to connect. In our case, we'll choose SQL Server > New Row as the "trigger" > Gmail > Send Email as the "action."

Click Create Zap and you'll be prompted to enter some more information about these connections. Start with the SQL account. You'll need to tell Zapier how to get permissions to look at the SQL database that powers your Access 2013 web app. Zapier will want to know things like server name, database name, username and password. To find out these things for your database, open it in Access, click File > Info > Manage Connections.

From this menu, you'll want to click From Any Location to disable firewall rules that would otherwise prevent a third-party service like Zapier from connecting. Then, click Enable Read-Only Connection which will generate a username and password that Zapier can use. To view these details, click View Read-Only Connection Information, which will show you something that looks like this:

Back in Zapier, you can copy this information into the Zap. Be sure to use port 1433 to connect:

Next, you'll want to tell Zapier which table it should monitor for changes and how it can tell which rows are new. We'll pick the Messages table, and tell it to examine the ID field. Since the ID field is a number that is automatically increased by one as new rows are added, this will be a reliable way for Zapier to tell the new rows from the old ones.

Next, you'll want to enter the credentials to your Gmail account so that Zapier can send the emails. Gmail is just used as a means of sending-the notifications can be sent to any inbox, such as Outlook, Yahoo, etc.

After your Gmail account is configured, you have to tell Zapier how to map the fields in the Messages table in SQL to the fields that Gmail expects. This part is pretty straightforward: the To field in Gmail maps to the To field in SQL, and so on:

That's it! You can easily test out your Zap by choosing "Click to load samples!" This will load the first row that Zapier finds in the Message table, and you can click to send a sample message.

The final step is to make your Zap live. This means that Zapier will run it every 15 minutes to check for new records in the Messages table, sending emails if it finds any.

You can try Zapier out for free for 15 days. Since SQL connections are a premium service for Zapier, you can sign up for a paid plan when the trial expires. See www.zapier for pricing details.

This article has outlined how to use notifications for a specific example, but there are many other situations where this capability will be useful. However, regardless of the scenario, you can follow the three steps above. We can't wait to hear about the cool things you're able to do with this technique!

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LayerVault adds new features for Photoshop collaboration

LayerVault is a PSD-savvy service for versioning & collaborating on design work, and it’s just added a swath of cool new features (the “Wormhole” mechanism for inspecting changes being especially neat).  News site BetaKit writes,

Users can now view edits happening in real-time, and open compatible files directly in the browser, meaning less popping in and out of apps just to make a few minor tweaks. Tools added now let them pick colors and create transferable palettes on the fly, for instance, as well as measure design components with a click.

Here’s a 1-minute tour of what’s new: 

Posted by John Nack at 8:56 AM on May 09, 2012

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We’ll Toast to That: Office 365 Provides Improved Collaboration and Efficiency for Global Team (Video)

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With a team of contributors located around the world, Wine & Spirits Magazine conducts a lot of business online. When employees started to use email for document management, collaboration became difficult and inefficient. Additionally, there were concerns that the content delivered to the printer might not be the final, edited articles. Seeing the many issues this way of working could create, the company began testing Microsoft Office 365.

Office 365 is a set of highly secure, cloud-based tools. It includes Microsoft SharePoint Online for collaboration and document sharing, Microsoft Exchange Online for email, and Microsoft Lync Online for instant messaging and web conferencing.

Watch the brief video below and hear directly from Wine & Spirits Publisher Josh Green and Director of Finance Roy Schneider about their experience with Office 365:

--Stephen Bury

See how customers are using Office 365 here.

Interested in trying or buying? Research plans or start a free trial now.

Just want to know more? Visit Office365.com.

 

 

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