Project Portals and Wave Goodbye
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Well, Google Wave didn’t last too long. It’s still up and supported likely through the end of the year, but
…Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product…
We explored it when the hype was heavy and thought it maybe a solution to managing projects…but it also suffered from being too open in that regard (couldn’t segregate users to various waves/projects) and the document sharing, which would be our biggest need, just wasn’t really up to snuff.
So the hunt continues. We have a custom-made portal for managing projects where users can be setup and assigned to specific projects, documents uploaded/checked-in/checked-out, and some simple version control…
…but there are so many other options out there, we’re exploring just making use of the efforts that have already taken place.
When we started our LMS development, the few existing products were unwieldy and expensive. We saw a great market opportunity for the smaller business looking to get into the world of LMS products and SCORM. However, the project management software landscape is already mature…so no need to re-invent that wheel. Plus, we’re dedicated to Inquisiq so no need to split resources to another SaaS product that likely has limited growth potential.
Any particular PM portal software services you have found useful, if not indispensable? Sharepoint is a common solution but that’s a pretty big beast to learn and support…and while other companies offer Sharepoint SaaS options, it’s not cheap.
We tried Basecamp for a while but it…less than ideal; it didn’t even support simple text formatting. Pretty basic software.
We’ve also tried Intuit’s QuickBase, which is passable, but also has very basic text formatting support.
Neither have any document version control. In short, both products were good…5 years ago.
So now we’ll be exploring:
Central Desktop
Sosius
Comindwork
Huddle
That is, as soon as we’ve got the time to go exploring!