FYI, here is an interesting article:

Salesforce.com plans to add Office 2.0 applications to its AppExchange

Just wondering if you are doing somethjing behind the scene.

Regards

It has so much potential…

Projity is a good Web-based “single” project management package, with all fundamental capabilities. I am not sure how well it would support your program and portfolio management. There are key components still missing. Requirements Management, Risk Management, and Configuration Management are prime examples. Moreover, I would not subscribe to a service if it did not support PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). Many government agencies and large corporations have put in place the PKI either internally or through subscription for user identification and authentication!

Francis

P.S. My experience with Zoho Virtual Office was largely negative! I downloaded and installed the package, and played with it. It works with FireFox 2 and IE6, but fails with IE7. It behaves very differently between FireFox 2 and IE6. In essence, it is not browser neutral — a rudimentary capability in both Web 2.0 and Office 2.0.

Check out Projity — let me know what you think.

I do not want to seem like I’m going back on my earlier statements — I do love collaboration. I also do find that what people call a project varies quite considerably, and you are right in that there is no current Web 2.0 solution that covers PMBOK or Prince2 (that I know of).

At this point I would be willing to settle for an application with Web 2.0 capabilities that allows me to do WBS and Gantt charts, and allows data exchange with Microsoft Project (or similar) for more detailed analysis.

I actually manage programs or portfolios of projects, and I would love to have a dashboard of projects, so I can do PPM, and the tools for PM for individual projects.

Groove.net, now part of Microsoft Office 2007, does that fairly well thanks to software from Team Direction. However, it’s not as nimble as a Web 2.0 application, it relies on downloaded software, and it annoyingly loads up at start-up. Ray Ozzie — its originator — is now Microsoft’s CSO, so who knows which way the application is going — they are talking about tying into the Exchange Server, etc.

I want a browser based solution that allows me to summarize my projects in a dashboard, allows me to do WBS and Gantt charting, and simple status report (a la Earned Value). I know this is not asking for much, but I do not think developers and PM’s sat together and had a conversation over this.

I did try Zoho, and I have to say I am encouraged by the progress they’re making though. Patience and steady progress will win the day. In the meanwhile, I guess we’re free to contact the good people at Zoho, or Basecamp, etc. and suggest options and improvements per Ismael’s database.

Just my 2 cents.

Every Office 2.0 Project Management package, in its current form, meets less 10% of the Project Management requirements as shown in PMI-PMBOK (Project Management Institute - Project Management Body of Knowlege). The 2000 edition of PMI-PMBOK was adopted by ANSI and IEEE as official Project Management standard. The 2000 edition of PMI-PMBOK is no longer available from PMI, but there is an extended copy downloadable from the Defense Acquistion University.

My experience with Office 2.0 packages is that they are still in the hyperware category, just out of vapourware category. In essence, they fall far short of matching any of the Office 1.0 capabilities. Collaboration and Groupware are nothing new. Microsoft’s Office SharePoint and IBM’s Lotus Note are all web-based now, and have more functionality than the current Office 2.0 packages! When one uses only the Mac platform, very few, if not none, collaboration and groupware packages are available, as Mac has less than 10% of the market share!

-Francis

I read a book from 37signals called “Getting Real.” It gives you insight on how these very succesful people think. While there are a lot of good concepts in the book, there are also some goofs (imho) that I attribute to background, and maybe the exuberance of youth.

There is a chapter (see below) entitled “Have an Enemy” in which they explain their desire to democratize applications and promote collaboration. To do that they pick an “enemy” or a model of what not to be. For project management software, they picked Microsoft Project and they decided to remove all charts, graphs, reports, etc. to liberate the project team from what they call the “Project Dictator”, and instead foster collaboration and communication.

It was their desire to create the “Anti-Project”, and I am afraid they succeeded. While I am all for collaboration, graphs, charts and reports are really needed for a project to be completed on scope, budget and schedule. This is exactly where I find their software woefully inadequate.

It is maybe that we define the term “project” in different ways, but I cannot see how you can run a project effectively without a Gantt chart, a critical path, financial reports, etc.

Without at least a very basic implementation of the above features, project management software is nothing but a collaborative approach to task management and to-do listing. Which incidentally is what I find their software to be.

It would be interesting to know what the good folks at 37signals use to manage their own projects, and how they stay on scope, budget, and schedule.

Just a thought,

-Ryan

“Have an Enemy. Pick a fight. Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn’t be. Figure out your app’s enemy and you’ll shine a light on where you need to go.

When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project.

We realized project management isn’t about charts, graphs, reports and statistics — it’s about communication. It also isn’t about a project manager sitting up high and broadcasting a project plan. It’s about everyone taking responsibility together to make the project work.

Our enemy was the Project Management Dictators and the tools they used to crack the whip. We wanted to democratize project management — make it something everyone was a part of (including the client). Projects turn out better when everyone takes collective ownership of the process.”

I wanted to add one more Office 2.0 application to your review list.

We have just launched our application called Uhuroo (the name comes from the word uhuru, which means freedom in swahili). Uhuroo is a collaborative Web research tool. The tool helps users to collect, organize, share (with individuals or groups), and consolidate interesting information from Web pages as part of various research initiatives.

Our goal is to enable people to do Research, and not re-search. It would be great if you could try out it and give us some feedback.

Thanks,
 -Kaushal

I recently attended the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. It was also attended by many of the who’s who in the Office 2.0, Web 2.0 and SaaS world, as well as industry veterans from Esther Dyson…

I’ve been playing around with GTDTiddlyWiki for about a month now, and pleased to hear about ZiddlyWiki recently. It has a unique feature to export your TiddlyWiki, continue working on it, and synchronize back later. They have a sandbox, and I am eagerly awaiting a free Zope account to try out the synchronization feature fully.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who would like to start integrating synchronization technologies with one of the most basic primitives — wikis!

First kudos for the conference. It was great!

Second, I think it’s just a matter of time before the Office 2.0 applications will be able to work off-line. Even today, such a technology exists, and you save a version of your documents inside your browser (Flash can act as a local storage) and flush them to the server when it’s available. I haven’t seen any Office 2.0 product using that, but it’s just a matter of time…

Regards,

-Lenkov, SiteKreator.com

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