Working on the web
After years and years of promises, claims, demands and requests, web services are finally starting to show a glimmer of genuine quality. The benefits of working online are obvious. You have access to all the information you need, on any computer with a web browser. However, at the same time, this presents a whole new range of potential problems that you need to be aware of before handing out any credit card numbers or logon accounts to either family members or members of staff.
Most notably, using a web service means entrusting personal or potentially mission-critical information to a third-party company, with all the caveats that suggests. Security is a major concern. Ideally, you should be looking for services that encrypt everything, making full use of SSL and encrypted wireless connections to access your data. Anyone who can punch in a username and password in the office will be able to punch them in at home, immediately seeing (if not necessarily controlling) everything that your group is getting up to. Passwords like ‘password’ are no longer just an individual problem, or under the purview of dedicated security experts.
The second problem is price. Although many of the products we’re going to be covering can be used for personal purposes, our focus here is on group working. In such cases, everybody usually needs their own account to store, or occasionally even access, the group’s data, quickly raising the price from an easily swallowed $5 a month to something rather more excessive. Online calendaring tool Trumba is a good example. It’s $40 a year – just over £20 – which is reasonable enough, until you realise that to make proper use of it as a family is likely to cost £100 a year when all’s said and done.
The portable you
Backpack is an excellent example of a modern web application in action. It’s easily described: an online notebook to keep track of to-do lists, files, images and actual timestamped notes. A basic account is free, giving you five pages to work on, although there’s no support for file uploading, with commercial packages running from a monthly $5 (£3) for 20 pages and 40MB of space, to $19 (£11) for 500 pages and 250MB of space. It’s a brilliantly simple tool – slickly designed and easy to use, and you’re not limited to one list, one set of notes and one set of links per page, as you can put any HTML you like into the main Body panel if these aren’t enough to cover your needs.
The importance of integration
This is the type of scope that any modern web service needs. If nothing else, you can’t risk running a business, or potentially devoting years of your time to updates, on a service that can swallow your essential data. Sadly, there are no guarantees. Unlike a standard application, if the company goes out of business, it almost certainly takes its software with it.
There are exceptions, such as Tasks Pro – a downloadable, installable version, along with a fully hosted alternative to be found at here. A five-user version will cost you $120 (£65), while the hosted version is $9 (£5) a month.
However, to really handle group working, an online component is essential. Using a network of your own forces you to troubleshoot, install, watch for upgrades, and of course, leave a server on all day, every day, watching out for power outages, viruses and many other potential problems. Using a hosted service takes much of the control out of your hands, but equally, almost all of the problems. You can feel much more confident that everything will just work when you, family members, or important clients log in.
Balancing your needs
Unlike many software packages, dedicated web services rarely have an advertising budget, and rely heavily on word of mouth. In almost every case, you have choices beyond the ones that people talk about on Slashdot and Boing-Boing – and it costs nothing to give them a try. Take the calendar mentioned earlier, Trumba. You can get more or less the same featureset, without the style, for free here, focus more specifically on organising meet-ups here, or handle events here. The most obvious thing that differentiates many web services is the interface: for every Backpack, with its sleek AJAX controls, there’s a hundred grey, miserable programs stuffed with oversized icons and longwinded interaction. Always take the time to find one that you’re comfortable using, even if it’s not necessarily the most feature packed example of its kind.
Working in larger groups
One of the most important things to look for is exactly who the product’s ‘group’ consists of. In many cases, it’s possible to publish information on to the open web for anyone to see and make use of – calendars, to-do lists and other areas of interest. The catch comes when you want to restrict information, and here the cost can quickly start to rise. Backpack is a good example of how it can work. You can make a page private, and specify who gets to see it, but to make this work properly, the privileged viewer has to have an account on the system. This is free, and therefore not a problem. Trumba, meanwhile, only offers a 60-day trial, and while it’s a great calendar, any long-term group work requires everyone to pay up.
The one thing that almost every service has in common, regardless of its target, is that everyone has their own individual login on the system. Basecamp (more on this later) is a web application from the makers of Backpack, which uses a slightly different method. It’s a project management system that charges according to the number of individual projects you create, allowing you to give filtered access to everyone from employees to clients, each seeing only the necessary pieces of the puzzle.
Unfortunately, not everything is always so easy. Sometimes, a service insists on forcing its own way of working down your throat. Ringo is a perfect example. It’s an online address book, but one with heavy social networking leanings. We’ll be covering those services next month. What stands out is that it puts an artificial barrier between you and the people you want to access – specifically, there’s no way of adding users. Instead, you have to send out invitations to everybody you want to add, and they in turn have to create an account to be added on to your list. As a result, unless you can rely on everyone in your personal network being willing to sign up for that, or Plaxo, or any other service with the same basic idea, you end up with your important information scattered around on multiple sites. Not ideal when trying to find something in a hurry, but potentially useful for keeping contact information up to date if you can persuade everyone to buy into the idea of signing up.
Going beyond the home
Groupware web services are worming their way into increasingly professional fields. Basecamp, as we’ve already mentioned, isn’t really designed for individual users, but rather mission-critical project management. It’s not simply a tool that you would use with a team, but one you’d open up to clients, bosses, and all sorts of other potential visitors. The same applies to sites run by packages such as Microsoft’s SharePoint, and many more, where social group work isn’t merely how you go about handling your projects, but the public face of them. Never has so much relied on entirely third-party systems – and never has it been so important to make sure that both the service itself and the company providing it will mesh with the way you work.
Not just handling the administration online, but putting it in a form nobody will query.
Basecamp is a fully fledged project management system, and a very good one – more important however is how it, and many products like it, handle themselves. Rather than restricting you to a set number of users, payment is handled according to how many projects you want to run. If you don’t want to pay, you only get one project at a time. With a payment plan in place, all the Basecamp gubbins are removed: the sleek interface remains, but your emails stop mentioning the name of the service, it’s not flagged up on the pages, there are no logos to get in the way, and nothing else to make either bosses or clients nervous about the software they’re logging into every day. As an extra disguise, while the interface itself is locked down, you can upload your own company logos and use the name, further making it feel like an internal tool rather than a third-party service.
When it comes to features, Basecamp takes full advantage of being online. In addition to making note of milestones and important dates on a calendar, you get individual to-do lists that the project members can browse at will, an internal blog-style messaging system, complete with comments, and also categorisation. If you have an FTP server, you can also upload and access files straight from the main Basecamp interface.
Crucially – and this goes for 37Signals Backpack, and even Ta-da Lists as well – Basecamp is extremely fluid to use, leaving you the scope to work around features that might be missing, rather than forcing you to adapt to its own rigid method. In addition (as is the case with most of the services mentioned here), it provides a way of exporting the data on your system in a number of ways, including XML, RSS and iCal, rather than attempting to lock your data into its own walled garden.