I met this morning with Steve from Joblogs - a startup out of Canada which launched their offering today.
Joblogs is most readily described as CRM, relationship and management lite. It serves up a nice, intuitive and quick workspace which allows for the aggregation of contact information, email and documents and links and stakeholder comments all in one location. Their name is a mashup of Job and Blogs - not blogs in the traditional sense but in the sense of being enablers of two way communication and idea collaboration.
It’s a good solution for anyone handling large number of customer interactions - service based industries being the most obvious - anyone that requires daily coordination of a dynamic set of different data streams.
It goes out to general release on Monday 9 September and has been bootstrapped via subscription from a previous offering. Joblogs puts their specific points of difference as;
Non-obstructive user interface (e.g. no save or cancel buttons, and of course no page refreshes)
Customizable databases with drag and drop
Private blogs with that serve as a point of collaboration for business projects
Arbitrarily relate different records together
Email dropbox that automatically links messages to associated contacts, companies and projects
Everyone intros their product - interesting that there doesn’t seem to be much differentiation in project management - they’re all perhaps fighting for the same customers.
Comments around the end of siloed information. The change from a project manager being a silo of information to a position where everyone is a collaborative partner in the PM process. No one is a project manager anymore - everyone is a manager, responsible for tasks.
Differentiation between mass scale PM projects that need Gantt charts, top down control massive documentation however for 99% of PM work that isn’t needed. New way of thinking a federated PM model where users can work in whatever way is best for them and behind the scenes the information is federated backwards and forwards between apps.
Project managers today spend their time battling with crappy software - PM2.0 releases them to do real project management instead of being a project secretary.
The main takeaway and one which I concur with, is that no one player will replace Microsoft Project, rather there will be an ecosystem of varied flavours of PM app that all have a share of the market.
10 things I can do in the cloud today, that I couldn’t do a year ago. Keynote by head of the enterprise applications team, Matthew Glotzbach. He’s drunk from the Kool-Aid big time! It was a very Google centric presentation - but cool nonetheless.
Everything on the go - iPhone
Search through all my email - Gmail search
Chat with customers and partners - in any language- very cool live demo of inline translation of chat!
Collaborate simply with sites and docs
Organise travel - (the first non Google product today TripIt)
Easily collect data from co-workers and customers using forms
Build a scalable business application on the cloud platform
Use online templates for docs, spreadsheets and presentations
Run fast, secure and stable web apps (Chrome)
Securely share video in apps
Lots of backchatter on Twitter here from attendees that it was very much a Google pitch - oh well… if Google is at the forefront of cloud computing then I guess that’s what happens
Getting things done. (and a thought - isn’t spending time talking about having to get things done a little oxymoronic - kind of like fighting for peace?)
David Allen, founder of the Getting Things Done methodology spoke and described his process for Getting Things Done. I’ve never been a huge fan of these sorts of programs - I figure you’re either a good time manager or you aren’t. Although that’s easy for me to say - I find multi tasking pretty easy (no matter what my wife says!)
Having said that the GTD methodology sounds like a useful tool for those with too much on their plates and too little time to complete everything.
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