For small-business people who are juggling clients and contractors, collaboration tools that help you share documents, hold live chats and synchronize projects can be a life-saver.
Dana Ditomaso, the founder and partner of the Hamilton-based Web development company Liquidesign, uses a tool called Basecamp on each of her Web projects to share files and post prototypes.
But, most importantly, Basecamp keeps track of all the e-mails and to-do items related to a project.
"It saves me from having a billion different e-mails," says Ms. Ditomaso, who posts all project-related notes to the system instead. "This thing kicks out an e-mail when new messages are posted."
Two years ago, Ms. Ditomaso stumbled across Basecamp during an Internet search. She chose it for its simple interface and easy navigation, which she says allows the product to be grasped by less tech-savvy clients as well as her subcontractors.
Hosted on-line, Basecamp starts at $24 (U.S.) a month for a 15-project licence. It's the flagship product of Chicago-based 37signals LLC, a company that also makes other collaborative programs including a personal project tool called Backpack, a group chat tool called Campfire, a to-do list called Ta-da List and a collaborative writing tool called Writeboard.
The simplicity of Basecamp is in keeping with the company's mandate to create simple tools that focus on the basics, says Jason Fried, president of 37signals.
"Our whole philosophy is that software in general is way too complex, it has too many features, it tries to do too many things, it tries to be too clever," Mr. Fried says. "We're putting products out there that are stripped down. It doesn't mean that they're too simple for their own good, but they're perfectly simple in that they execute basics simply and leave everything else off."
For Kimberly Silk of Toronto-based BrightSail Marketing and Product Management, an emptier in-box and a more accountable system is another attraction of collaboration software.
"Nobody can complain they never got the e-mails," says Ms. Silk, who was an early adopter of the collaboration tools produced by Groove Networks, a company recently acquired by Microsoft Corp. Ms. Silk uses Groove Virtual Office to manage three separate clients with her fellow contractors. Besides using the software's instant messaging, project tracking and file sharing features, she uses the tool to take conference-call meeting minutes in real time.
Groove's software is peer-to-peer, so Ms. Silk's minutes are quickly downloaded onto each participant's computer, a fact that Microsoft marketing manager Ryan Hoppe says is an advantage for small businesses that might not have servers to support an enterprise solution.
"One of the challenges from a small business standpoint is that they don't have the infrastructure that a large company would have to support collaboration software," Mr. Hoppe says. The next version of Groove will be offered both as an integrated part of Microsoft Office and as a standalone product called LiveGroove with hosted access at a subscription price of $79 (U.S.) a person per year. Both versions will also be integrated with MS Office's SharePoint files tool, so that the final collaboration files can be synchronized onto a SharePoint site.
Lynda Morris, vice president of Toronto-based NicLyn Consulting Corp., not only uses collaboration software herself but helps her small business clients to choose and implement programs themselves. Ms. Morris says she tried out more than 30 software packages, noting the pros and cons of each. For her own business, she settled on Adobe's Macromedia Breeze, which she uses for twice-weekly meetings with her business partner, who is travelling in Japan.
"Breeze was very intuitive," Ms. Morris says. "It had a really simple interface, and I could have it up and running in half an hour." She and her partner make the most use of the document-sharing and white-board features to brainstorm and work collaboratively on editing documents. Breeze costs $375 (U.S.) a month for a five-person license.
