Best regards
Hannes

Very interesting article.

The product we use, and which is now commercially available, was initially built to help us run our own web software company (www.estatestoday.co.uk)

We needed:

Contact Management to:
1. Manage many companies details
2. Manage and interact with many contacts
3. Track all comments, assign tasks and store documents relating to the above
4. Create Task reports for sales meetings
5. Be able to create good looking email newsletters
6. Be able to send these newsletters to unlimited custom mailing lists
7. Link companies to relevant projects
8. Distribute contact details by vCards
9. Keep abreast of what our clients were doing by enabling real-time searching across Twitter, Google News and Google Blogs.

Project Management to:
1. Create unlimited projects and link users to them
2. Track and share comments
3. Track and share tasks
4. Track and share documents
5. Have advanced search facilities across tasks and documents
6. Have good quality reporting on project activity
7. Keep everyone updated by email whenever any activity occurs
8. Have all the above outputted to bespoke RSS feeds
9. Link projects to companies and image galleries

Image Management to:
1. Store and share any number of image galleries for marketing, presentations, websites etc
2. Add comments to images
3. View metadata and licensing information of images
4. Batch upload and edit images
5. Create custom lightboxes
6. View as slideshows
7. Link galleries to projects and companies

Instant Messaging to:
Text chat and share documents in real time with a fellow user

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY:
1. Be able to view and keep track of all the above really easily
2. Do it all with a system which is attractive and a pleasure to use.
3. Be able to easily collaborate on all of this with our colleagues, clients and suppliers

http://www.glasnost21.com does all of the above.

If we need to screenshare (which we do a lot) we use Skype.
If we need to have conference calls we use Powwownow and/or Skype.
If we need to co-author documents (rare for us) we use Google Docs.

We think the things we do are pretty commonplace amongst ‘knowledge workers’.

Put together this solution is lightweight, efficient, lovely to use and scaleable up to hundreds of people with ease.

More on our website, including a free trial version and a live demo.

Regards

Antony Slumbers

I’d never force my team to use any Microsoft product. The incompatibilities are too great and while they are “big,” their innovation is so slow that products by younger startups blow Microsoft out of the water every time.

I’ll always go for the nimble companies and products that are in touch with and in tune with the needs of their customers vs. the Goliath that forces their antiquated and clunky ways on the rest of us.