Project management rules need to be in place so that everyone knows what to do and when to do it. That’s easy if the project team works in the same location, more difficulty if it is a country wide or even worldwide project.

Writeboard is a lightweight unobtrusive service that allows everyone to share a whiteboard with other users.

Whiteboards are a great way to save information in writing. Online whiteboards offer the same advantages while getting rid of the same location requirement.

One user creates a new whiteboard by specifying a name, password and email address. The whiteboard is a basic text editing form on a website.

A limited set of formatting options are available. It is possible to create lists, headers, embed links and logos and make text bold or italic.

This is done in a special syntax, not with the usual text formatting tools that almost every text editor on the Internet offers.

writeboard

The original creator is able to invite new people to collaborate. This is done by sending them email invites from within the software. It is possible to skip the step and work with the login information of the thread starter. This would mean however that it is not easy to find out which user made which modifications to the document.

The main page of the whiteboard displays the contents and versions. It is possible to compare two versions of a text to see the differences.

whiteboard text comparison

Text can be exported in either a txt document or as a html file.

Each Writeboard project consists of the following four steps:

• Write something… Write a business letter, copy for your website, a marketing brochure, or a product description, or a weblog post, or a song, or a poem, or an idea, or an essay, or a book chapter, or whatever else you might normally write in your email program, text editor, or word processor.
• …share it… Want to collaborate on some copy? Want to pass a memo or letter by someone else for editing before you send it? Want to work with your business partners on some text for a proposal? Want fellow students to contribute to a group paper? Want to collaborate with a client on wording for their project?
• …revise it… Writeboard makes editing easy and safe. Every time you save an edit a new version is created and linked in the sidebar. This allows you to write without fear of deleting something, overwriting something, or losing a better version of the document from last week.
• …compare it.Ever want to know what changed between two versions of a writeboard? Simple. Just check off two versions and click the compare button. Everything that was deleted will be grey and struck, everything that’s new will be highlighted green.

The main benefit of using Writeboard instead of other online services (like Google Docs for instance) that offer work collaboration is that it is easy to create and use.

Projects that need more formatting options and functions are better of with advanced project collaboration services. (via Free Download A Day)

In this article I am going to introduce you to KPlato, its installation and features.

Installation

KPlato is part of the KOffice office suite. So if you have KOffice on your machine, you have KPlato. If you do not have KOffice, follow these steps:

1. Open up Synaptic (or your favorite Add/Remove Software tool).
2. Do a search for “koffice” (no quotes).
3. Select koffice for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. If you go to the Applications > Office menu you should see KPlato listed. Click on it to fire the management tool up.

The interface

Figure 1

When you first fire up KPlato you will be introduced to a pseudo-wizard (see Figure 1) that will ask you if you want to look at your recent documents, open a previous documents, or start a new document based on a template.

To start a new file, based on a template, click on either the Plain or the 8 Hour Day/40 Hour workweek template. Let’s open up the latter and begin a project.

Here are the steps to creating/managing a project:

1. Define tasks

2. Estimate effort to perform each task.

3. Allocate resources for task.

4. Schedule the project according to the dependency network and resource availability.

Let’s create a project shall we?

Defining a task

Figure 2

The first thing to do is to click on the Tasks entry in the left pane (after you have selected a Template from the “wizard” screen. Once you have done that click the Add Task button (see Figure 2) which will add a line item across the middle and right pane of the main window. Now do the following:

1. Give the task a name.
2. Set the Estimate Type to “duration”.
3. Set Estimate to “8 hours”.
4. Set Contraint to “As soon as possible”.
5. Click the Schedules entry in the Left pane.
6. Click Add Schedules (which will create a line item).
7. Click the Calculate button.

Your task is now scheduled to begin at 12 am and last for 8 hours.  This task, of course, is very basic. You can always break the task down into smaller, constituent parts. Say, for example, your project is cleaning house. You can break this down into rooms or chores and then allocate resources (family members for example) to each room. You can then add resources such as mops, wash cloths, brooms, dusters, etc and allocate them to rooms or family members.

Figure 3

You can allocate these resources by clicking on the Dependencies (Graph), double-clicking on the task you want to allocate resources to, and then clicking on the Resources tab in the new window. As you can see (in Figure 3) I am allocating worker Jack with Tools Broom, Dustpan,and Vacuum for his task in cleaning the Basement.

Final thoughts

There are tons of features offered by KPlato – many of which will only be appreciated by those deeply familiar with project management tools. But even those without a deep understanding of such tools can take advantage of KPlato. It’s an outstanding tool that can give a business (or home) a solid project management tool without having to spend any of your fiscal resources to implement.

The app gives you project, task and resource management, a calendar, wiki projects and issues. I really love the way that it handles resources and issues. The reason I haven’t transfered my real work to an online app is that it is very rare that project management software supports adding someone t your team, without actually having them come and accept and then working with you inside the app. I don’t want to colaborate with my people through apps, I just want a way to track who’s doing what. ProjectOffice does require the name and email, but you can just enter a dummy email and you’re off.

Apart from that, issues is something that is very unique to this program, I may just start using this app because of this. The feature is very closely related to bug tracking, a special type of management module that programmers use.

You can create an issue, much like a task, but from there on, you can very easily track the phases of it, through a very well though out menu. You can change the status from opened to analyzed, closed and so on. This is really handy if you have actually completed a task, but you find out it’s not perfect. You don’t have to create the task again, just put it in issues. It is also great if you have a lot of problems you need to look into and track.

The only problem I had was that you can’t create indefinite projects. You can only add a project if you specify a start and end date, while may of my projects aren’t tied to dates. If you can get past that problem, I think you’ll find a pretty useful app. Enjoy!