I’ve become a big believer in the idea that teams can in fact work remotely from one another on just about any project. Some of the work that I do has me partnering with people in and out of town, not to mention clients that are all over the world for my full time job at AmeriStart and my part time gigs through Right Here Interactive.
This has me testing and trying many tools out there that can make me more effective and efficient in working with team members and clients. If you are doing some collaboration, here are some tools to check out:
- ConceptShare – http://www.conceptshare.com. This is a great tool for collaboration on design projects (website, print pieces, etc.). It lets you post comments, get group collaboration. pretty sweet and simple.
- Wizehive – http://www.wizehive.com. This is a pretty decent task management, currently lacking dependent tasks. Its in beta still and may be a player soon.
- Axure – http://www.axure.com. this is the most complete prototyping software I’ve ever worked with. Prototyping software, lets you define the user experience of functional applications like software and web applications to clients before having a developer write a single line of code. Once you define your project, developers have a much easier time with build out since tools like these give them all the specifications they need. With Axure (pronounced “azshure”), you can get deeply granular when your doing functional development. I built the last large software project I worked on using it and it definitely communicates well to a developer. The big drawbacks are that it’s a desktop application for about $500 and it installs only on Windows. Mac users like me who want everything hosted are none to happy, but c’est la vie.
- ProtoShare – http://www.protoshare.com. This is a simplified hosted tool for wireframing and prototyping. When you’re not defining too much complexity (think functional websites, but not software), this is a great tool. It renders HTML screens for review by clients and even developers. This is the best tool for wireframing I’ve found for Interactive Developers like me. Check them out! It’s pricing starts at $26 per user per month and goes from there. It works fantastically well on Mac using Firefox.
- iPlotz – http://www.iplotz.com. This is a decent start to a hybrid prototyping/ task management tool. I see this for less complex projects, more static type sites. A single account is free. It’s really made for making website layouts and screens and not a whole lot else. Cool for ad agencies and entry level designers, but its no Protoshare.
- Zapproved – http://www.zapproved.com. Technically, this helps centralize the decision making process. In theory it sounds great and when I can convince a customer that this is the tool to use, I’ll let you know :)….
- Accomplice – http://accomplice.vertabase.
com/index.html – This is a really interesting tool for collaborating on tasks. Unfortunately, it completely blows up on My Mac/Windows environment and I have no idea why, so I had to give it up. Our Opps guy and our designer use it all the time. - Online Time Sheets – http://www.onlinetimesheets.
com – This guy has been around for a long time and is a Charlotte native (unless he sold the company or something). Good tool for Time Tracking and the PM tool was okay, but I haven’t used it in two years. I’m not familiar with their current pricing, but I promise its affordable.
I’ll be doing more in depth reviews on these tools in the future. in the mean time, if you have some more collaboration or software tools, please post to this thread and I’ll check them out.