Posted by pas on 30 June, 2008 19:29

Noone's happy with trying to remember one more password. And we're really eager to make things easier!

Let me introduce Open authentication feature.

Right now you may choose to log in using your

• GMail account
• Yahoo account
• OpenId

You can see the 'sign in' form changed:


But before signing in, we need to identify you. It's only you who may tell that your GMail account really belongs to you.
So first of all, please log in with your Comindwork account, go to Preferences area and set up your credentials:



We hope this makes your work more convinient. Let us know what you think of this feature and other Comindwork features. Drop a note, and stay cool. :)

Alex

  Posted by godzhesas on 24 June, 2008 10:58

I doubt that there are a lot of people interested in project management who haven't read David Allen's "Getting Things Done" or as it is often abbreviated as GTD. Well in case if you haven't read it, I'll explain the basic principles that were provided in the book. The main idea of the whole things comes to that you need to get the stuff out from your head, write things you need to do somewhere. According to Allen, when you have freed yourself from the job of remembering a lot of important stuff (remember you need to write it down), you can actually concentrate and get things done you've written down on your list.

So now we know what the GTD is all about, lets take a look at the core getting things done methodology and how you can use Comindwork for your needs as an online getting things done software. Allen believes in two main things when it comes down to time management - control and perspective. He recommends three main methods on gaining control and perspective:

1. Workflow process
2. Framework with 6 levels of focus
3. Natural planning method

I would like to note that I think that one of the best tools for GTD is wiki. This is one of my favourite Comindwork features, you can easily use Comindwork wiki and other features for controlling your 6 levels of focus:

• Current actions - Comindwork dashboard helps you quickly find who is doing what, what task you've been assigned
• Current projects - project activity feature comes in very handy here, it helps to see what is going on across all of your projects without a need to go into details (only in few seconds you can see the wiki, tasks, blogs, file activity)
• Areas of responsibility - the easiest way is to create a wiki document like responsibility matrix, set visibility options and update it any time when needed
• Yearly goals - you can set project goals with just one click from the project dashboard, fast and easy
• 5 year vision - you need to use wiki for this one, in five years a lot of things will change, you might want to update your vision, but that is what's great about wiki - you can compare with the older versions and see the changes.
• Life goals - one word: wiki :)

 

I will share some tips on workflow process and natural planning method on my next post, meanwhile you can sign up for a free account and tell what you think and keep tuned.

  Posted by godzhesas on 18 June, 2008 12:27

Ok first of all let's find out what is Scrum? Scrum is iterative and incremental software development process; others sometime call it agile software development framework. Today Scrum is very popular with project managers, because complements agile project management practices and makes the project delivery process more efficient. Here are some general Scrum practices and how Comindwork+Scrum can help you in increasing project productivity even more:

• Customers become a part of the development team. In Comindwork you can invite your Customers to participate in the projects, get feedback, and discuss goals. Clients will be aware about all project work and changes.
• Frequent risk and mitigation plans developed by the development team itself. Using Comindwork wiki you can easily track and make any changes needed to any plans on the fly, with RSS and email notifications you can be sure that the whole project team will be informed about these project changes right away.
• Transparent work process. In Comindwork you can use cases to assign tasks, and project and personal dashboards come in very handy here, because within one click you can see who is doing what and where. Within a click you can get a project report about the tasks and the time spent to implement them.
• Monitor progress with global project timeline, where you can see all the ongoing activities of a project.
• Flexible time and location. With Comindwork, because it is an online project management solution, you can work anytime, form anywhere, whenever it is convenient for you and your team, of course as long as you have internet connection :)

Comindwork is great for Scrum, because event if your team is separated by great distances you can still make Scrum like process work for your project: dashboards, reports, notifications, timeline, tasks, blogs - all these features will help you to increase productivity. Don't forget that one user can participate in a lot of projects, so project dashboards are of a great value to quickly find out where the project is heading to.


When combining Scrum management methodology and Comindwork you will make the work more productive, more effective and most importantly you will get to the final release of your product faster. So don't waste another minute and sign up for a free account now.

  Posted by godzhesas on 13 June, 2008 11:00

What is the difference between Comindwork and Basecamp? It'd be great if I could say "hey, Comindwork is the best online project management tool out there", but I believe that today yet we still don't have the best tool, I hope and believe that after a year or two the answer to that answer will be Comindwork. I have nothing against Basecamp, it is great, effective and easy to use tool, but I've read a lot of complains about their customer support and that experienced project managers find their feature set "not sufficient". What Comindwork is trying to do - get all the features that project managers and team members need for productive project work in one place, and try to keep it usable and simple. Here are some of the main features offered by Comindwork that you won't find in Basecamp:

• Comindwork is free for small teams (unlimited users,  1active project) - no feature restrictions. And you can go with self-hosted plan and put it on your own server in your office.
• Customizable. You can order Comindwork customization or improvements according to your internal workflows.
• Advanced search - powered by Lucene algorithms
• Knowledge management - enterprise wiki, categories and tagging
• Collaboration - internal project blog, comment on any wiki page, project and team dashboards, RSS and email notifications
• Reports and charts - rich visualization of the project status and team work stream.
• Customers actually influence the product - features are developed upon request and suggestions
• 23 different languages
• Video replies
• Last, but not least - great customer support

Comindwork is a great solution for any company that wants to manage it's projects more effectively, especially if you are working with distributed teams.

  Posted by godzhesas on 11 June, 2008 09:43

What is the project supposed to produce? New business service? A new site design? Will it fix a software bug? Tell your team what it's supposed to produce, one of the first things you need to do - set clear and realistic goals. This helps to define the boundaries of the project and focuses the team's efforts on producing an outcome. Deliverable is a frequently used term in project management because it focuses on output. Please note that there can be both intermediate and end deliverables. The distinction lies in whether the deliverable is the final product that fulfills the purpose of the project, or whether it is used to manage the project or development process, like a blueprint. Here are couple examples for easier
understanding:

• A document specifying the requirements of a new piece of software is an intermediate deliverable, while the finished software product is an end deliverable.
• A description of a target market is an intermediate deliverable, while an advertising campaign using magazine ads and television commercials is an end deliverable.
• A study of a new university admissions policy is an intermediate deliverable. The actual new university admissions process is an end deliverable.

How do you manage your project deliverables? Does Comindwork make this easier for you? If no, what improvements you'd like to see?

  Posted by andrew on 09 June, 2008 16:11

Today we launched integration with Google Translate (beta) to automatically translate Comindwork user interface to 23 languages. You may switch to another language simply by selecting your native language in the right-top corner.

We started German, French, Italian and Spanish versions improvements per user-suggestions (yes, unfortunately automatic-translation is yet far from perfection). Please send your suggestions about translation of certain terms, tabs and sections for these languages. We really appreciate your contribution!

And here is the list of languages enabled:

1. Arabic
2. Bulgarian
3. Chinese
4. Czech
5. Croatian
6. Danish
7. Dutch
8. English
9. Finnish
10. French
11. German
12. Greek
13. Hindi
14. Italian
15. Japanese
16. Korean
17. Norwegian
18. Polish
19. Portuguese
20. Romanian
21. Russian
22. Spanish
23. Swedish

  Posted by pas on 09 June, 2008 14:49

We're glad to announce the new place for sharing ideas, Comindwork Forum.

It's high time to discuss current featurs, vote for new ones, or just drop a note about something that bothers you in everyday work.

• Maybe something is missing in Comindwork functionality?
• Probably, you want to share your experience and find a new solution for an issue in managing your project?
• Something may work better, and you know what exactly?

You can enter the forum either from your working area: there's a new link in the bottom of every page. Or you may start browsing Forum right now, and sign in with your Comindwork account.

Keep talking!

  Posted by pas on 09 June, 2008 10:15

Open source software seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. There is such a modern tendency to make projects more open. The reasons for it are: increasing demand for speed of project launch; global competition; Internet as a medium for communication.

Actually, all Enterprise 2.0 aspects overlap with ‘openness’ issue. Personally me, I love the term ‘freeconomics’ instead of Enterprise 2.0. You can choose whatever is better for you.

The goal of this post is to investigate the requirements to a platform for open projects and open organizations.

Speaking of open source software, the most comprehensive guide is written by Karl Fogel in his book ‘Producing Open Source Software’. The questions covered are good enough to be listed here:

• Starting Open Source Software Project
• Technical Infrastructure
• Money
• Communications
• Packaging, Releasing, and Daily Development
• Managing Volunteers
• Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents

But we’re sure there are more people interested in ‘openness’ then software developers. Moreover, it’s not necessarily ‘open source’ people who need to be open.

If you’re proud of what you’re doing. If you do not separate your business life from your friends life (you do projects with friends, yeah). If you want the best talents and experts to help you in making your project. If your business is searching for investors, partners and new specialists to work with. There’s no other way but to go into the global sea of communicating with people :)

There’re beautiful samples of non-software open projects done as businesses: ‘Elephants Dream’, the first open movie; Engineers Without Borders, semi-volunteers work across the globe, dmoz and many more.

So, here’re our requirements to Enterprise 2.0 technical platform:

• There are several layers of ‘visibility’ that company may maintain: inner workers, partners, investors, friends, other world. All items below may apply in different way to these layers.
• Anyone can see participating people (team) and talk to them directly
• The processes that are run in organization, are visible to whole world. ‘Visible’ may include even online video from your office. If you want :)
• The artifacts of your processes are visible: documents, source code, decisions. Unless you’re an CIA unit, of course.
• It’s easy to invite someone to the team using social networking mechanism
• All the layers of communication should be tracked: face-to-face, video conferencing, emails, instant messangers.

Well, I’m not a zealot of total openness. If your business idea should remain secret, let it be secret. But remember, it won’t last for long.

Have a nice day!