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Do you maintain a spreadsheet of all your various usernames and passwords? Do you store passwords using your browser's function, but worry that if your laptop was lost others might gain access to sensitive data and wreak havoc in your name?

TriCipher's MyOneLogin may be the solution you've needed. Use a single secure username and password to login to a centralized location where you can access all your various SaaS accounts.

This browser based solution (which requires no downloads or configuration). At only $30 per user per year, it is an affordable solution to managing user identities for your entire staff from a centralized location that a system administrator can control. Add or remove all web-based accounts for new or departing employees within minutes.

Google Apps, SalesForce.com, Citrix, and ADP are just some of the vendors that support MyOneLogin access. It can also be used for your company's VPN network access. Find out more on the company's site at MyOneLogin.com.

Labels: Recommended_Apps, SaaS

In a previous article I presented several cross-object workflow solutions, with the caveat that though it was possible to create the rules in SalesForce.com, they wouldn't get triggered across the objects automatically. To solve this problem, we have created Aspira XObject, a free tool that allows System Administrators to create "Relations" between objects so that when criteria is met on one object, workflow rules get run on another as if both were just edited.

The idea of creating the tool arose when I was working on a non-profit SFDC system optimization project and the client had an elaborate set of conditions between different custom objects where internship applications moved through stages dependent on actions being tracked on several other objects, such as the service opportunity being approved, the intern being approved, forms having been received, and so on. There was a web of lookups and workflow connecting the objects, but it wasn't working effectively because you had to know the application should be in a certain stage to go edit it in order to trigger the workflow that would update the field to the correct stage. This obviously made no sense; why use workflow at all if a user needs to know it is time to change the stage?

We created a coded solution at the time that cost them thousands of dollars, and then a few weeks later they came back and said, "This is great. Now can you make it also include this fourth object?"

It was clear a coded solution that worked one object at a time was not going to really solve their problem. They needed to be able to continue developing their cross-object application progress tracking system independently without having to go back to the developer each time.

Around the same time I started participating in a conversation on Twitter where people were lamenting the lack of immediate firing of cross-object workflow. I was then confident that a solution was going to have value to enough companies for it to be worthwhile developing it as an installable app. Thus Aspira XObject on the AppExchange was born.

You can download the free version on the AppExchange if you are in Enterprise, Unlimited or the non-profit edition of SalesForce.com (must have workflow rules to use it). With the free tool you can automate any workflow that is on standard objects. If you need to automate the firing of rules on custom objects, that extended application is available for a fee that is just a fraction of what a custom coded solution would cost. Hope your company finds it useful.

Labels: CRM, Recommended_Apps

... and down goes the frequency of articles on this blog.

If you are a regular reader, you have probably come to expect a new review of web-based business technologies each week. Not only is that not going to happen this week, it is unlikely to happen more than a few times in the next 6 weeks. That is because the volume of new business coming our way has made it impossible to explore new technologies.

I move within a community of technology consultants, and it seems to be this experience is fairly widespread right now. August was fairly intense, September quite intense, and October coming on like a lion. Hopefully you and your business have been able to benefit from what appears to be an upswing in the economy. If not, I think it is likely you soon will.

I'm not going to dare to prognosticate the end of the global recession, but at the very least it seems that other than a few specific industries (construction, real estate, etc.) the decline has at least stopped. Companies are realizing they can't run on fumes any longer, and that if they want to meet the opportunities before them, they are going to have to start investing in their business's growth again, whether that be by hiring staff or by implementing labor saving technologies.

I'm very excited about some new members of the AspiraTech team who have been brought on-board to meet increasing client demand for a wider and wider array of technology consultation services. We also have a new AppExchange application coming out within the next few weeks, that I will write more about upon release. And then there is DreamForce coming quickly behind. Good times.

So please bear with us through this busy period. Looking forward to bringing you more time-saving reviews of the best new apps as they come to our attention - as soon as we have time!

Labels: Recommended_Apps

As air travel gets more and more expensive and workforces get more and more decentralized, businesses find they have more and more reason to use online services to conduct meetings, demo products or services to potential customers, and share information with anyone possessing internet access.

Let me begin this review by saying that I really wanted Zoho Meeting to be the ultimate winner in my "battle of the online meeting services." Everyone likes to root for the little guy, and I was hoping to cut my $49/m service bill down to Zoho's very attractive $24, while simultaneously bumping myself up from 15 max meeting attendees to 25. If only.

I was even willing to overlook the fact that conference calling wasn't fully integrated. I signed up for a free conference calling service through InstantConference and was all set to start sending out that number as my static conference call number for all meetings. My clients would even prefer that, I argued, not having to call in on a different number each time we would meet. (Actually I may still wind up using that free service for any meetings that don't require screen sharing.)

But then I sent out a meeting invite to another one of my own accounts so I could test the service. That was the end of my consideration of Zoho as a meeting interface for my corporate clients. Here is what the email I received (which a client would receive) looked like:

Not only is the graphical presentation cheesy (what's with the psychedelic green?) but there is more screen real estate dedicated to promoting Zoho Meeting than there is to providing meeting information. The Toll-free number provided for calling Zoho Support is highlighted way too much, particularly given that there is no call-in number integrated into the service. It would be likely some people would call that number thinking it was the conference call number.

If you start a meeting using a different technique (instead of start now, schedule for later) you have the chance to put in text that includes whatever number you want attendees to call in on, including the option of using the Rondee service which Zoho recommends. The problem is that this information is still not nearly as highlighted as the tech support number. Is Zoho that convinced that someone is going to need to use that number during the meeting, or are they just that focused on promoting their company regardless of the impact on their users?

My company's reputation is simply worth more to me than $25 a month. Which brought me up to the next least expensive option, either GotoMeeting or ReadyTalk, both costing $49/month on a month-to-month service plan. Both are pretty similar, with the key difference I found being that Ready Talk limits you to 14 particpants, including the presenter among the 15 max participants, while GoToMeeting allows you to actually invite 15 people, plus the organizer. That may seem like a small difference, but having to tell clients that only 15 people can attend the meeting is limiting enough as it is. So why 14? Can Ready Talk really not afford to let that one last computer synch in so that they can be competitive with GTM?

I wish there was an individual user plan with GoTo that would allow me to invite 25 participants. To get that you have to have a corporate account with at least 5 organizers. For most companies that will be the option they will take, as it is definitely the best available option if you can make use of it.

Citrix, the makers of GoToMeeting, also offer a service called GoToWebinar that can have up to 1000 participants, and costs $99/month. When you consider the potential revenue generated from the unlimited number of such a webinars one could hold each month for that price, it is a real winner. Also, when you purchase GoToWebinar, you get the meeting service included for free, for your smaller meetings.

Unlike Zoho, both Ready Talk and GoToMeeting include integrated, free conference calling. A unique phone number and access code is provided for each meeting, and there is also the option of using VOIP calling features so that every participant can call in for free using their web phone. Both also integrated scheduled meetings into Outlook Calendars or iCalendar, so you get meeting reminders just like any other meeting in your Calendar. Lastly, you can record any meeting and publish to the web so that people who couldn't attend can view it later.

Moving up the price scale we come to the mother of web meetings, Cisco's Webex. What do you get by choosing Webex instead of GoTo or Ready Talk? Everything provided with either of those, plus 25 max participants per meeting, and a monthly price tag that is $20 higher.

For any business with at least 5 staff members organizing meetings, GoTo corporate is the way to go. You get the 25 participant limit, all the cool features of online meetings, and pay $20 less per month per user than with Webex. If you fall into the in-between, needing 16-25 participants in some meetings and having 4 or fewer people in your company who need to organize meetings (as opposed to simply attending those organized by other staff members), then Webex may make sense.

Here's the breakdown of key factors:

I've been using GoToMeeting quite happily for the last couple years, and though I had hoped to cut my bill in half by switching to Zoho, I'll be sticking with GoTo. It is the most respected and pervasive meeting service out there aside from Webex, and is a reliable, cost-effective option for showing whatever is on your screen to anyone anywhere who has internet access... even working with 3G smartphones.

You can get a free 30 day trial of any of these software services to check them out for yourself. (Webex's front page currently says it is a 14 day free trial, but if you navigate through the site you see you can find several 30 day trial links.) Let me know what you think of them yourself when you do. Happy meeting.

Labels: Recommended_Apps, SaaS

Confession, I avoid Apex like the plague. I don't want to know it myself, and don't expect any of my clients' in-house SFDC Admins to want to know it either. Yet whenever an Apex solution is created for them (by someone else at AspiraTech, never me) the client is forever dependent on a developer to maintain that functionality for them as their business process and related needs change over time. That is just not the way I like to work. I am all about teaching a person to fish instead of just giving them a fish. I love the ongoing relationships I have with my clients, but I want those relationships to be focused on my assisting them with additional solutions, not just tweaking the ones they already have because they are unable to adapt them themselves.

So I look for solutions that are provided within creative use of the standard user interface, VisualForce pages (which I then teach them to maintain), and AppExchange applications that have any needed Apex baked in.

One of my favorite Apps is Form Assembly. Though the product was originally created as a standalone website form service like Survey Monkey, it has grown to be something far more powerful than that with its SFDC integration.

With Form Assembly you can update any object in SFDC through your company's website. Want to collect feedback from your customers and have it added directly to their Contact record? Create a form using FA. Want to have forms on your website generate new records on a custom object you created, such as event registrations? FA feeds directly into custom objects. How about those pesky "Stay-in-Touch Requests" that send Contacts to a form to update their contact information, but then submit the form results to you as an email, requiring data entry to get the new info into their Contact record? Once again, FA to the rescue.

FA even offers PayPal integration, conditional fields (which SFDC does not offer), and calculated fields. I could go on and on about the many things I love about the app, and one of the best is its amazingly affordable $34/user/month price tag. Remember, the only user who needs the FA license is the one who will be creating the forms.

Honestly, the only thing I can say against FA is that they have made the puzzling decision not to make free trials available for even a week. I was therefore unable to demonstrate any of the SFDC integration for you in screenshots. The only trial I could access is one hosted on their site that is not integrated with SFDC, and even then you only get 2 hours of access, beginning as soon as you click the "Test Drive" button in AppExchange.

Come on folks. What do you think we are going to do, create a bunch of forms week one then not buy the service? It's only $34 per month! And it's such a great product, of course customers will want more than a week's access --though not us developers; hence our need to be able to access it to test use cases for our clients before putting them live in their systems. Give developers ongoing access without the ability to host forms on any site other than FA's and no ability to receive data from some critical field, like email, if you are really afraid of folks stealing access. And give the general public full access for just a week so that they can try it out without having to spend any money up front.

Apart from the irrational paranoia of the vendor, it really is a no-lose product, one every SFDC user should really consider implementing. With Form Assembly you get cross-object action without needing any Apex. One form can feed into multiple objects, creating needed records that are interdependent at the click of a "submit form" button. Skip the Apex and get Form Assembly.

Labels: CRM, Integration, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

When you go into a store, you expect there to be staff there whose primary job is to help customers like you find the products you want as efficiently as possible. If you wind up wandering around on your own for too long, unable to find what you're looking for or anyone who can answer your questions, you are likely to leave in frustration, empty handed.

So when it comes to your business and the customers wandering through your website, do you provide "in-store" assistance? Enter LivePerson, a technology that connects your sales staff with website visitors in real-time.

With LivePerson you can set business rules that alert sales staff when website visitors are engaging in certain behaviors that suggest they may be a high value potential sale that is about to head for the door. Sales staff can then reach out to them and essentially ask, "Can I help you find something?" If the person responds that they would like assistance, a chat conversation begins.

Just as in a store the sales assistant could either tell the customer which aisle to find the needed item in or walk them over to it and put it right in their hands, the LivePerson assistant can do the same. They can either explain the answer to a general question if that is what the customer needs, or find the product the person is looking for and "push" that page to the customer, so that they don't have to do anything themselves to navigate to it.

This is just one feature of what the LivePerson (LP) system can do for your business presence online. This business use alone has routinely accounted for a 20% increase in sales for the businesses who have implemented LP, which you can find out more about by reading their success stories. Customer post-sales support is another major area in which LP's approach to customer relationship success offers tremendous value.

I came across LivePerson when I was evaluating chat software services for a SalesForce.com CRM client who wanted to integrate chat with their SFDC customer service app. The two technologies work seamlessly together, with lead, account, contact and case data passing easily between the two applications. Check out this integration plug-in on the SFDC AppExchange.

My client wound up going with just one LP seat license to start, just to get a sense of how it would work for them, since they were skating a very thin profit margin at the time. (I would generally advise a more comprehensive approach to integrating the technology into one's business process, if you can possibly afford to do so right now.) The cost for them was a little under $100/month, which isn't the cheapest chat you can find, but it is the best value. With LP you get far more than just a chat application. You get a business system, complete with reporting and optimization services provided by LP. You are coached and guided through not only implementation of the technology, but through the fine tuning of your business process so that you take full advantage of what the technology can do for your business.

The return on investment with LivePerson seems to be so definite that it is hard to make the business case for not using it. That is, if you do in fact want people who visit your website to come away satisfied with their experience, while your bottom line takes a marked ascent.

Labels: Integration, Recommended_Apps

Keep your reader recommendations coming. It is reader feedback that led me to Intervals, a truly superior solution for project management and client invoicing within one integrated web-based application. If you’ve read this blog in the past, you will be well familiar with how much I love Harvest, appreciate Basecamp, and loathe eProject/Daptiv. Enter Intervals, the killer app.

Time Tracking, Tasks & Invoicing

Intervals is both a project management and invoicing system. Its conception of the word "task" is more a part of project management than invoicing. Compared with Harvest, a pure invoicing system which views a "task" as something you charge for, Intervals requires a lot more work to get out an invoice.

Intervals forces you to plan ahead to create tasks in advance, or else feels like dual entry (task and time) when you go to enter time towards an invoice. Annoying when you are spontaneously deciding on tasks to do and just want to quickly enter the time, the way Harvest works quite well.

In Intervals you can track billable time within a “general time” bucket that includes no task, but that can be confusing if you are jumping between activities and want to detail them on the final invoice. I prefer Harvest’s quick and easy way to create new tasks and track time against them at once, rather than as two separate steps.

Within Intervals, you can just click an icon to start tracking time on the very next screen after creating the task, but at that point there will be no access to the "work type" drop-down list, unlike when you select the button “add time to this task” after creating the task or start the time recording on the "Time" tab. And then after you stop the timer and want to actually "apply" the time to the task, it is necessary to then enter the worktype info in another dialogue box, so basically it is the same as using the button in the beginning and having to complete two screens.

In Harvest less is entered when creating the task and the click of an icon button applies that first set of entries to populate all the data that will later be invoiced. That approach is much more streamlined, involving only half the data entry for each task, which really adds up.

I like that Intervals includes due dates on tasks by default, which Harvest doesn’t, since it isn’t thinking of a task as a “to do” so much as a billable unit of time. Instead of having it be so easy to create new tasks and log time against them as in Harvest, one is more prone to have fewer tasks and then keep returning to them in order to log time against them over several days. It isn’t that you can’t use Harvest in just as “organized” a way as Intervals. It's just that it is so easy to be sloppier in Harvest that there is a greater likelihood you will be.

In Intervals time tracking is a part of project management, and invoicing is an outgrowth of the fact that you already logged the time against a project. In Harvest time tracking is done solely for the sake of invoicing. If all you need is well organized, super quick and easy invoicing, Harvest is your solution.

Project Management Evaluation

Just as Intervals can be compared to Harvest when it comes to time tracking and invoicing, it can be compared to Basecamp when it comes to project management. Basecamp also includes time tracking features, but since they don't extend to include invoicing, it is an incomplete solution, requiring the addition of another app like Harvest to complete the job.

Project management is the one area in which I thought Intervals might not outshine the competition. User interface preferences vary a great deal from person to person, as do business processes from company to company. I recognize others may have a very different view of this, but when I compared the Basecamp and Intervals user experiences, again I wound up solidly preferring Intervals. The user interface is more intuitive, easier to read, and easier to navigate. There are also a number of pre-made reports that can be quite helpful.

Like Basecamp, the Intervals project management approach is more about organizing communication around tasks that have been done or need to be done by different people. It is less Gantt oriented than a software like eProject/Daptiv, which seeks to imitate MS Project within a SaaS app. I don't mind losing the Gantt view, but the one thing I couldn’t find in Intervals that I did want was a way to make one milestone/task’s start dependent on another’s completion. When one task gets pushed back, this affects all subsequent tasks, but how do you show this in Intervals without having to manually edit all subsequent tasks/milestones that should be dependent? The answer is found within their user forum:

“We used to use Microsoft Project heavily for all of our projects and we found that we spent too much time tending to and tuning the schedule. Intervals deliberately does not have task dependencies the way traditional project management solutions work. Via trial and error we found that Gantt charts are great at scheduling and articulating the steps to build something, but aren't that useful managing the day to day tasks of getting the work done. Intervals is very strong on the task tracking and getting things done side, but weak on the scheduling side. The milestones and light scheduling piece we [have implemented] strengthen the scheduling side quite a bit. You [can] create a milestone, attach tasks to it, and manage the tasks and milestones via a calendar view. You [can] drag and drop and move tasks and milestones around. It is definitely not traditional task dependencies, but it is a different way to approach the issue.”

The other major feature of traditional PM where Intervals takes a different road is resource allocation. To quote their user forum once more: “Intervals does not feature traditional resource allocation. We are working on a periscope report that will show how much work has been assigned vs. how much is done, but it is different than the resource allocation found in traditional project management (no resource leveling for example). It is meant to answer the question of "how much work do we have on the books" and can be filtered by client, person, project, etc. It may or may not do the trick depending on your needs.”

Like Basecamp, Intervals is taking a non-Gantt approach to project management. I find that the calendar editing function within Intervals is easy enough to use to make it pretty easy to manually move dependent tasks when you want, and at least with Intervals I can pick any timeframe I want to see in calendar view (unlike Basecamp).

To sum it up, as one of Interval’s customer testimonials proclaims: “At the end of the day, the core platform of Basecamp™ did not focus on time, work flow and reporting, which is where Intervals excels.” Amen.

The Costs

Pricing of Intervals is done by the number of projects, whereas in Harvest it is done by the number of users. With Intervals, for only $20 per month I get up to 15 projects with unlimited users (both staff and client users). In Harvest I get unlimited projects, but am on a plan that allows for only 1 user and pay $12 per month. Of course, since Harvest isn’t a project management app, you may not need more than one person to be able to log in, just whoever generates invoices. Still, the Harvest price point jumps from $12 for 1 user to $40 for 5, so if you do need more than one person entering their time in the app, you're going to pay for it. You can’t pay the same $20 as for Intervals and get 2.5 users, and this is just the time tracking and invoicing feature set we're talking about.

Basecamp's pricing for a plan that includes time tracking on each project, but no client invoicing, is $49/month for unlimited users and 35 projects. So combining Basecamp with Harvest would cost $61/month, and get you project management, time tracking related to projects that can be exported into the invoicing app, invoicing, a 35 project limited, unlimited PM users, 1 invoicing user, plus 10GB of document storage.

With Intervals, for a third that price I get the features of both Basecamp and Harvest within one integrated package, and the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. At that price, I do get fewer projects and less document storage - 15 projects, 1 GB storage - but there are still unlimited users, so clients can be invited to contribute to mark tasks as done and view project progress. For my company, 15 projects is sufficient, since you can activate and deactivate projects at will, and we are never working on more than 15 projects at once. It would be nice to have more native storage which would obsolesce our use of ftp to share files during data migrations, but it's not a deal breaker.

Needless to say, I will be canceling my Basecamp and Harvest subscriptions at the end of the next billing period, and making the switch to Intervals. Try Intervals out for 30 days yourself to see if it is an approach that will work for your business.

(Special Nice-To-Have: Intervals creates a permalink page for each task, so that contributors can conveniently be directed to that specific task page.)

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

If Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a revolutionary trend in business paradigms, Social CRM is the natural evolution that is upon us now. If you sell a product or service, or care about a cause you want to promote, you have simply got to be on Twitter. I have Twitter accounts both for my consulting business and for my non-profit volunteer work. I see dozens of new site visitors each day that arrive through tweets I post on Twitter, and you could too.

SalesForce.com CRM (SFDC) is the next part of that equation. With SFDC I can see which visitors submitted a form on the site and track them all the way through won opportunities if someone contracts for consulting services. I can then continue to service clients through a custom object I created called Projects and through Cases after service is provided. And of course, all of this is tracked in numerous ways by SFDC's campaign, reporting and dashboard features, so that I can increasingly make better decisions about how to most effectively let people who need what I offer know that they can get it here.

Toucan integrates these two powerful SaaS business technologies, so that you can not only take advantage of Twitter's marketing and PR power, but do so from within SalesForce.com. Just as you should be integrating your paid Google Adwords campaigns directly into SFDC, you should of course be integrating your free Twitter campaigns into SFDC also.

Of the tweets you've posted over the last month, which ones generated the most traffic to your website? Which tweets generated the most sales? Which tweets led to the shortest sales cycles? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you need Toucan and SalesForce. (If you don't already have SFDC, you can get a one month SalesForce.com Free trial here.)

Twitter is free, and Toucan is pretty close to free itself. If you have up to 25 SFDC users you can get a 1 year license for only $150. That's $150 for everyone, not per user, and not per month.

Instead of reiterating the same how-to material Toucan makes available themselves, I'll just point you to a couple helpful links:

2 minute Toucan intro video - Toucan for SalesForce Intro Video
Request the password for a 7 day free trial - email to
Get It Now link on AppExchange for after you receive the password - Get Toucan for SFDC

With the password you will receive a link to a two page configuration guide that includes helpful screenshots and step by step directions. I tried skipping that (rarely read directions on anything), but got stopped at my first step trying to just muddle through. So I suggest you take the 10 minutes to read the guide they send and just do it right the first time.

The only thing I found missing in the guide is that after you are done doing everything they list there you will want to add your Twitter ID under "Settings" within the Toucan app. That instruction is also not found within the user documentation they will send you a link to. You can't actually tweet anything through SFDC (like the initial message in a new campaign) until you enter your Twitter ID and password under Settings, as shown below:


The folks at Toucan are also very nice, and ready and willing to help at the drop of a hat. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I may also add to this post in another week, after playing with this longer and seeing the stats for the week.

Labels: CRM, Integration, marketing, PR, Recommended_Apps

I've been comparing email marketing options and Predictive Response (PR) is looking like the best option for SalesForce.com users. The level of integration with the CRM simply can't be beat by such vendors as Vertical Response and BridgeMail. I am even more convinced PR must have a pretty tough package to beat given that earlier this week when I was exchanging messages with a BridgeMail representative the conversation abruptly came to an end when I politely asked him to clarify the business case for their service over PR. He has not responded back since.

On the other hand, PR's responsiveness in making the case for their service over BM was in keeping with my general experience of how they operate. These are people you can reach at 7pm on a Friday evening, and who will be happy to help however they can. Based in CA, with apparently all their tech support based there also, they offer a great product delivered with great support.

The two things I like most about PR are 1) the integration with SFDC, so that you don't have to maintain two sets of lists when SFDC is already a list management system; and 2) the ability to continually refine email marketing campaigns based on recipient behavior. You can see which links they follow in any email you send, which pages on your webite they then visit, which links on those pages they click, how long they watch any video, and so on. And it all funnels directly into SFDC, so that you can report on it right along with all your Opportunity data. And of course, it all feeds back to your campaigns' ROI as well.

Another element Kevin at PR pointed out to me is that PR is campaign based, not list based, in how it "thinks" about marketing. With a list based system like BridgeMail, if someone signs up for your newsletter mid-month, the only way you can send them that month's newsletter is to resend to the entire list. With PR, you simply add them to the campaign and SFDC keeps track of who within the campaign has or hasn't been sent which newsletters. So you then just send to the ones who haven't already received it.

The entire "drip campaign" approach of PR is a marketing winner. As you get feedback on what is working or not for given INDIVIDUALS, you refine your methods of marketing TO THEM. The system moves them from one campaign to another based on their behavior. Making it more and more likely they will like what they see enough to make a purchase or engage a sales rep about a possible purchase (i.e. convert to an Opportunity).

You may note that this review talks a lot about Predictive Response in comparison with BridgeMail, without mentioning Vertical Response. That is because VR merits an article all its own, which will follow next week. As a preview though, expect PR to stack up quite favorably in my view. It is simply the best email marketing package for SFDC users that I have come across. If you know a better one, please bring it to my attention.

Labels: CRM, marketing, Recommended_Apps

I'm very much liking Basecamp for most project management tasks, but I'm just not seeing where the extra expense is justified to get the time tracking included. Not only do I not report on time in the same context as I track projects, but the Basecamp time tracking feature is pretty lame.

You basically just enter the number of hours and a note about what you did. That's it. The system puts in your name and there is no other info you can include. If you want an invoice to be created off the time tracking you can export a csv file, but then you have to manually create the invoice out of the stack of records with these random notes signifying what was done.

Compare that to Harvest's time tracking service, which feeds directly into an invoice that the system will even send to the client for you, along with follow up notes after a pre-determined period you set, until you mark the invoice as paid. Harvest allows you to set up standard tasks for a given project or all projects, enter the rate charged for the task (my company uses hours, but could be by other units also), then log your time on your desktop by selecting the task from a drop down then clicking a button in a widget to start the timer. When you are done simply click the timer again to stop it, and presto, your hours have been entered in Harvest for that task.

You can also log in to add time, and add notes to any task to supplement whatever is in the task name. Then invoicing the client is as simple as selecting what time period to invoice for and pressing send. The invoice goes out with your logo, messages, and invoice as PDF, plus imbedded in body of email. Perfect! And all for anywhere from just $12/month for one user to $5-9/month per user for 10 or more users.

True, Basecamp's time tracking comes at an extra cost of just $26/month for unlimited users, but in this case you truly get what you pay for. It is simply too limited an option in it's utility to be worth even $26/month, no matter how many scattered employees I was trying to track time for.

The fundamental Basecamp approach is the reason its time tracking feature isn't all that great. They offer all around collaboration as a project management method. For my company, time tracking is a part of invoicing, not project management. But for some companies they want to see the time being logged against a project within the context of the project itself. Instead of for invoicing, they track time to see how many hours are being done on a project by all the people involved.

The good news is, Harvest can receive time tracking information from Basecamp, so if you do have a reason to want time tracking in the project management system, you can still send the info over to Harvest for invoicing. You could then have just a single user Harvest account for the person who generates the invoices.

Another cool integration is that you can even use Twitter to send time updates from the road from your mobile phone. So if you aren't going near a laptop with wifi access anytime soon and don't want to have to write your time down somewhere for entry later, just twit it straight into Harvest from your car!

With the use of Harvest for time tracking, I can use the $24 monthly Basecamp account, and have a complete time tracking and invoicing solution. If one only worked on one or two projects at a time he/she could even use the free Basecamp account, though that is not the case for me. I am a real fan of both software services, and don't mind flipping between them to get the best of all worlds, instead of limiting myself to an integrated service that causes me to compromise on each feature.

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

It was years ago that the company at which I was SalesForce Admin decided they wanted me to also become the Go-To person for the new eProject software service they were purchasing. A consultant came in to train me and one of the PMPs for a week and then went home each day to work on our config based on the info we had shared and his experience with other clients.

As a SalesForce.com implementer myself now, I definitely know the value of having a consultant guide a business through the implementation of a complex piece of software. But should project management be considered in that category? Having no background with MS Project (to which I would compare eProject, in terms of its Gantt chart focus, etc.), I never did really groc eProject. Neither did any of the Product Managers who came to me in that first month with questions about how to get the reports they wanted out of the system. And that's what you get for $50 per user per month.

Now let's turn our attention to Basecamp. I set up a Basecamp account for my consulting business in about 20 minutes -- that includes 3 minutes deciding which service plan I wanted, 2 minutes entering all my information, 10 minutes watching the introductory video, then 5 minutes uploading my logo and customizing the defaults to my liking. Here's what that first customization screen looks like:


It's a small image showing a wide screen, so you may not be able to read all the type, but I'm sure you can see that it's a pretty simple setup. Within just minutes you upload your logo, choose which default items you want to delete (click the trash can beside them) or add (type into the little box then click "Add" button). You can also customize display colors and add unlimited additional users. Did you hear me right? I said UNLIMITED additional users, both from within your company or if you want you can allow access by your clients.

I chose the $50 monthly account which is the lowest amount that gets you time tracking. There is also a free account you could use to try it out, though it won't give you a chance to test the time tracking feature. All Basecamp's accounts come with the first 30 days free, so I would suggest doing the $50 account for the first few weeks so you can explore all the features, then downgrade to a cheaper or free plan if you don't think you really need the time tracking (or in the case of the free plan, don't need considerably more features, such as file storage, multiple users, or multiple projects).

For all you Gantt-heads, you are probably stuck with MS Project, eProject and their ilk. The Basecamp approach is entirely different. Once you've created a project (also very intuitive process), here's a screen you will see for tracking milestones:


As you can see, this is quite different from a Gantt chart. The idea behind Basecamp is to focus on organizing how people interact and share information (verbal info and files) on a project so that everyone knows what they are responsible to do when, how what they do or don't do affects others, and what others are doing and when they did it. So instead of a sole project manager who is responsible for herding cats (I mean managing project participants), everyone on the project shares that responsibility. Social rules apply and no one wants to be so obviously revealed as the one person who keeps pushing the project back when everyone else is working together well.

Basecamp does allow tasks to cascade with dependencies, just like in a Gannt, but if you really need to show all your project timelines and milestones within a Gantt chart, Basecamp won't be the solution for you. It presents the information more in the week appearance of a calendar than a full spreadsheet view that can show large numbers of items across a long time period.

But for those who can adopt a different way of thinking about what it means to manage a project for successful delivery, here's one last screenshot, Time Tracking:

Basecamp consists of To Do lists, Milestones, shared files, Time Tracking, Messages, Writeboards, and if you use 37Signals' other product, Campfire, integrated Chat. By combining these features it aims to keep everyone synchronized with each other so that milestones are known and achieved on time and within budget. If you are new to project management or open to an innovative approach, you will be joining the ranks of USA Today, Addidas, and Warner Brothers (a few of Basecamp's many customers) in opting for what I think is a great online project management solution.

I tell all my clients about Basecamp and for any that want it without investing the minimal time it takes to set it up I'll do it for them for a charge of about 100 bucks. It's always the case that I'm already familiar with their business process from designing whatever other service I'm providing them, so it doesn't take me long to translate that into a customized project management solution. There are 2-3 minute videos within Basecamp on each object's screen, and the system really is pretty intuitive, so most users self train, but with a few clients I've also tacked 30 minutes of Basecamp training onto whatever training I am already doing for their users, just to make it a seamless process.

Whether you dive into Basecamp on your own or have someone help you, you will be glad you did. Even if you decide to stick with another service to get your Gantt fix, for just $50 a month for unlimited usage, I would urge you to check out Basecamp and see how you might integrate its benefits. If you do, please come back and post a comment to let others know how you are working between the two and how it's going.

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS