Levie took aim at Microsoft early in his presentation, introducing Box.net as being “like Sharepoint, if Sharepoint actually worked,” and then showing a photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with a pirate-style eyepatch. The Box founder talked about how many companies are frustrated because more than $250 billion is spent on enterprise software annually, but the industry still suffers from bloated software that is expensive, slow to innovate and takes too long to deploy. And despite the size of the enterprise industry, no one really talks about how to make it better because everyone is too busy “talking about check-ins and virtual cows.”

Enterprises are going to create more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data this year alone, Levie said, but too much corporate software makes it hard to find that information, makes it hard to see who is using it and where, and makes it difficult or even impossible to share it outside the organization. The enterprise software industry is devoted to creating a complicated stack of programs and services that can be controlled by the company, he said, and IT departments spend all their time managing this infrastructure in the hope that it will create this “magical rainbow of enterprise value,” but the rainbow never appears.

Companies like Microsoft don’t want to dismantle this industry because they have so much invested in it, said Levie, but startups can re-imagine what the industry might look like if someone could rebuild it from the ground up — and the Box.net founder said it would look a lot more like the consumer software business, where satisfying users is the most important thing. “We need simple software, solutions that humans would choose to use even if they didn’t have to, and open systems where software works together instead of just locking customers into one solution,” he said.

With freemium and open-source and software-as-a-service models, companies can not only innovate and adapt rapidly, but users only pay if they like the product and find that it works for them, instead of buying a huge, complicated solution and then getting stuck with it — which Levie called the “Zappos model instead of the Oracle model.” And because they are more open, companies can choose several different pieces of software that work together, instead of going with a single-vendor solution.

The enterprise software industry may not see a lot of evangelists who wear orange sneakers and drop quotes from rappers like Notorious B.I.G. into their presentations, but Box.net’s CEO is clearly out to change that — and pretty much everything else the enterprise business seems to take for granted.

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In some cases, the responses I get include comments about how much users absolutely loathe particular tools, but they are forced to work with them due to their employers’ choices.

Have You Talked to Your Team?

There are plenty of teams that are happy with their tools. But it seems there are also many people who feel like they work in spite of their tools, rather than with them. You don’t want your team to fall into that second group, so how can you ensure that your team is happy withe the tools you select?

You’ll need to get feedback from employees at all levels of organizations.. It’s probably impossible to please everyone, but it’s a bad sign if your team members are willing to go on Twitter and explain every last detail of what they don’t like about the tools that they have to use.

Don’t frame this conversation by asking your team what they’re not happy about — find out how they think things could be improved. A fair number of the complaints I hear are, at the most basic level, about how things could be made better. This can be an opportunity: Your team sees a problem, but has also identified a solution that you can take advantage of.

A Conversation That Needs to Be Had

You probably already know if your team isn’t particularly excited about a particular tool. But it’s worth sitting down and actually having the conversation and asking a few simple questions: What could be improved? Are there any simple fixes? Are there any big fixes? Sometimes it’s not the case that a tool needs to be completely replaced; it could be a problem with a particular feature, or how the tool integrates with another product or a particular workflow.

You may not be able to act on the information you receive right away. The negative comments I routinely get about certain tools often come out of giant organizations— not exactly companies known for being able to turn on a dime. But knowing that a plan for better tools is in place will improve matters, and even just being heard can help make a less-than-ideal situation more palatable.

Image courtesy Flickr user Petras Gagilas

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• The Future of Workplaces
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Increasingly, the information we use to manage our companies is moving to the cloud, and human resources is no exception. Here are several solutions that provide simple and affordable online employee management and tracking to save you time, money and effort.

TribeHR is one of the more robust platforms of all the options, providing many HR management tools in one app:

• Vacation/leave tracking. Select, approve and track vacation and leave days, including earned and taken days. View vacation requests, as well as who is currently on vacation or leave.
• Employee development. Set, track, and complete goals, privately or shared. Get feedback and peer input, and collect notes and comments for performance reviews. You can also securely store employee evaluations for future reference, and track and rank employee skills company-wide.
• Employee notes and feedback. Privacy-controlled note-taking for employees and managers, as well as public employee recognition and company feedback.
• Shared resources. Post and store files for employee access and viewing. You can even track who acknowledges viewing the files you post.
• Job postings. Post available jobs for your organization and accept applications, make and share notes, and rank applicants.
• Reports. Generate reports for taken/available vacation and sick time, goal progress, skills, and file reading acknowledgement.

TribeHR also provides data portability, so you can export your company information. Plans range from $19 per month for up to 15 users, going up to $399 per month for unlimited users. A free trial is available.

BambooHR

BambooHR is another powerful HR software option with several great features to help  you manage your employee data:

• Employee records. Track employee information, such as contact information, dependents, emergency contacts, salary, and position history.
• Vacation/leave Tracking. As with TribeHR, BambooHR allows the tracking and management of employee leave time and allows employees to request time off for manager approval. It also tracks leave time accruals and balances.
• Training time tracking. Track one-time and recurring training, and even set due dates and alerts so that you can monitor employee training.
• Benefit tracking. Track benefit eligibility and enrollment dates, plans and coverage, as well as employee and company contributions.
• Online document storage. Store and share forms, applications, documents and performance reviews.
• Reports. Generate employee data reports, including job and salary history, leave time used, turnover rate, and create your own custom reports using BambooHR’s filtering and sorting capabilities.

Plans range from $79 per moth for up to 50 employees, going up to $599 per month for 1,000 employees. A free trial is available.

Effortless HR

Effortless HR offers features to help you centralize and manage employee information:

• Employee records/management. Save important employee information, including contact details, job information, benefits, skills, and performance data.
• Employee portal. Employees can update information, request time off, and clock in or out from within the Effortless HR platform.
• Employee email. Send company or department emails and announcements.
• Time tracking. Employees can clock in or clock out through the online interface and can view the hours they’ve worked in a given week. Managers can export time reports to work with your payroll software.
• File area. Share files with your entire company or with specific employees.
• Reports. Import and export employee information.

Plans range from $29.95 per month for up to 19 employees, going up to $99.95 per month for up to 1,000 employees.

iEmployee

iEmployee provides web-based time and attendance management and tracking through four separate products (costs are not disclosed on the website).

• Online paystubs. Provide paystub information online to eliminate printing and distribution costs. It also allows you to maintain an online archive of all paystubs for future reference.
• Timesheets. With its online tracking system, iEmployee provides an easy way to process payroll and improve accuracy.
• Vacation/leave tracking. Managers and employees are able to track vacation and sick time, and employees can request leave online for manager review and approval.
• Time clocks. The online interface, as well as optional time clock hardware and Integrated Voice Response (IVR) telephony features, allow employees to clock in and out.

All the solutions outlined above provide the ability to track and manage employee information remotely, making human resources yet another aspect of your company that can be accessed and stored completely online.

How do you manage and track employees and HR data?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Alex E. Proimos

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The report is damning: Only 65 percent of organizations carry out employee satisfaction surveys, and of them, roughly half bother to measure employee satisfaction with their technology devices, despite their importance for workplace productivity.

Dissatisfaction with corporate-issued devices and software has led to employees are bringing their own tools into the workplace. This can cause problems for corporate IT departments; it’s something I wrote about in a recent post for GigaOM Pro, “How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace” (sub. req.). However, it’s also worth noting that the difference between what we consider “consumer” and “enterprise” tools is shrinking rapidly: Gartner’s Nick Jones says he expects that there will essentially be no difference between the two within five years.

I’d like to get the opinions of the corporate web workers in the WWD readership about the tools that you use. How do you find the equipment and software (including web apps) that are issued to you by your employer? If they’re not up to scratch and are hindering your productivity, do you go ahead and use your own gear?

Photo by Flickr user SuperFantastic, licensed under CC 2.0.

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I generally wait to see how a new product is received before upgrading. I’ve been holding off on moving to Mac OS X 10.6.4, for example, because it’s reported to break some software that I depend on. But for some reason, I decided to upgrade to iOS 4, the latest version of the operating system for my iPod touch, the first day it was available. Unfortunately for those of us who use Exchange to sync our mail, calendars, and contacts with Google Apps, the upgrade required the re-syncing of this data, which in turn slowed Google’s servers to a crawl. It took almost 24 hours before I again had a usable device.

During that time, I got to thinking about the questions I should have asked myself before starting the update. Here’s what I came up with; please add your thoughts in the comments.

• Do you need the new features of the update? If it fixes security issues, then probably yes. If not, then you should consider whether the update will actually improve your workflow. For example, one of iOS4′s new features is the ability to create “folders,” or groups of applications, on the home screen. Is this important to you, even given its limitations? Another feature is multitasking, which has gotten mixed reviews, at best.
• What will the update cost? Of course, some new hardware and software isn’t free, but even if the manufacturer isn’t charging, what is the value of the time and effort it will take you to move to the new version? I suspect that evaluations of this question are why many companies are still using Windows XP and IE 6.
• Are there technical issues in the new version that may cause problems? This is where blogs and discussion forums can be lifesavers. If I had waited only a couple of hours before starting my iOS 4 upgrade, I would have found several posts and threads describing the exact issues I encountered, and would have known to wait until they were resolved.
• What are the consequences if something goes wrong? How easily can I revert to a previous version? Can I afford down time? Luckily, I wasn’t going anywhere the other day, but if I had been, it would have been very inconvenient not to have access to my email, calendars, and (especially) to my contacts.

How do you decide when to upgrade?

Image by Flickr user .schill, licensed under CC

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“If ease of use were the only requirement, we would all be riding tricycles” — Douglas Engelbart

Have you noticed that many web-based services advertise themselves with the premise of “less,” or being “simple?” They say their programs reduce the time and energy that your team exerts using unecessary and distracting features, functions and options, letting them focus instead on just doing their work.

Many people appreciate the loose structure of these tools. We use terms like “agile” and “flexible,” and for a lot of use cases this sort of framework can indeed be very appealing.

For example, let’s look at the typical web-based project management tools. Most are essentially designed to be warehouses for all data pertaining to a project. They integrate basic to-do lists, messaging and milestones and provide a framework to hang our project upon and to make sure nothing gets lost. Their open nature and lack of structure make them capable of accommodating a wide array of projects, and you can essentially make them work for just about anything or anyone.

Conversely though, and what concerns me, is that often the lack of features and perceived overhead can actually introduce more real overhead to your process. At what point does their simple nature become a hindrance to the work that actually needs to be done?

Yes, incorporating something like dependent task assignment adds complexity. Yes, introducing advanced message routing can require some thought and set up time. But these features provide value and are worth it in some instances, because working around the lack of some useful functionality causes users additional real — and ongoing — overhead.

The concept of overhead in this context was introduced to me in a recent chat I had with Hamid Shojaee of Axosoft, developers of bug tracking/project management tool OnTime, which I’ll be reviewing in the next day or so. His comments really got me thinking about the way that web applications are developed and marketed.

I certainly recognize and accept that some products and services naturally offer too much or too little functionality and that a single application won’t work for everyone. Needs, goals and requirements vary across the board and I’m glad that there are the multitude of options available to us. Being mindful of our decisions when choosing these applications and accepting the trade-off that “simple” may bring with it other consequences down the road when your needs change.

I always say the best thing about doing what I do is having the chance to interact with smart people, and talking with Hamid and others is always a fascinating and enlightening process. It is my pleasure to also have occasional chats with self-proclaimed “interface radical” Amy Hoy, designer for the Freckle time tracking service. We rant about the state of user interface and interaction design, and I always appreciate her candid comments.

In our most recent chat we talked about the concept of “simplicity,” and how as a mantra it provides a nice warm fuzzy feeling and a compelling argument for use, but is “less” or “simple” really the issue? She says an application can be complex, or introduce complexity and still be powerful, enjoyable and surprising. “Way too much of the usability talk on the web focuses on first run experience, says everything should be obvious, but that’s oversimplifying the issue.”

So what concerns me is if this quest for creating simple software is hurting us. Are we creating a culture of users that require a dumbed down experience, at the expense of the increased efficiencies and productivity gains we can realize with more complex tools? Are we also stifling the creativity of the designers and developers who are afraid to provide useful features because of the fear that they may be complex or not immediately obvious?

Hoy says, “A tool you use a lot should offer opportunities to grow and learn,” and I love this concept. We as business owners, entrepreneurs, web workers and freelancers are smart, naturally inquisative, resourceful and creative. We are capable of using software that challenges us; in fact, I believe we could benefit from it.

Are you afraid of your software doing less?

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One of those better options is Twitter. Twitter has the advantage of being a great way to open a direct line of communication between yourself and a potential employer before you even forward your work history or even any professional information at all. It’s almost the virtual equivalent of landing a job based on a conversation with a seatmate on an airplane.

JobDeck aims to make the process of looking for work on Twitter even easier. It provides a refined search that allows you to drill down and find job offers and information about prospective employers and employees, and it does it all in the familiar environment of TweetDeck, so as long as you’ve used the popular Adobe AIR-based Twitter client in the past, you won’t have to go learning a new interface all over again.

In fact, JobDeck really isn’t much more than a standard install of TweetDeck with some colorful rebadging and a couple of very special unique columns that will help you in your job search efforts. All the regular features are there, too, so you have access to your main timeline and all the time-wasting fun that could potentially go along with that. My advice? Create a new Twitter account devoted solely to job hunting in order to keep your focus and avoid distraction.

As mentioned, there are two new columns introduced in JobDeck, which is powered by TwitJobSearch, a site that provides search results from Twitter pre-filtered and tailored to job hunters. The first is a “Job Search Experts” user list. It’s a good way to pick up tips and find interesting articles about the job market and career development in general, and it has the benefit of allowing you to keep these people out of your main Twitter feed, where they might not be as appreciated or could get lost.

The other column is a dedicated column that returns results from the TwitJobSearch main feed, which searches the web, returns relevant job search results and organizes them into a single stream. As of right now, a lot of the traffic is related to the JobDeck app itself, but scrolling through the feed reveals that it does do a decent job of collecting career hunting info. Unfortunately, it’s also hit or miss, including info for jobs ranging from KFC front-line employees to iPhone app developers.

It’s nice, but it isn’t yet impressive enough to merit its own dedicated client in my opinion. It reminds me more of the Blink-182 branded TweetDeck release than a new and unique tool. The TwitJobSearch site itself is a much more useful tool, with customizable advanced search options and an experimental job map feature. Not to mention that the interface is quite attractive and highly usable, and there’s a browse function that lets you see job tweets by category in case you aren’t yet sure what exactly it is you’re looking for.

If you’re already using TweetDeck and you’re looking for work, using the JobDeck special edition isn’t going to cost you anything, and might provide you with a few useful links and/or tips. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something that will dramatically change they way you look for work, skip this release and just use the web-based or iPhone version  of TwitJobSearch, especially if you’re not a fan of the TweetDeck interface.

Landed a job through Twitter? Tell us about how you did it!

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Seesmic apparently saw the wisdom in that idea, because it recently revealed a new Windows-only Twitter client that doesn’t require AIR to run. I jumped at the chance to take the software, which is currently only available as a preview edition, for a test run.

Feature-rich

Seesmic for Windows has just about every bell and whistle I could ask for in a professional Twitter client, but without a lot of the unnecessary frills that I feel get thrown in with something like TweetDeck. It seems closer to Tweetie for Mac, which is still my favorite client, independent of platform concerns.

You can use multiple accounts, and customize your columns in the main window however you like. By default, your Home feed will display tweets from all the accounts you have registered with Seesmic, which is a great thing for people who use different Twitter accounts to organize the people they follow, like groups. For those who don’t, Seesmic includes support for Twitter lists, so that you can organize those you follow that way instead.

My personal favorite feature of Seesmic is how the compose window uses your first-entered account by default. That means regardless of what post I reply to, and in what stream I find it, the reply originates from my main account. This is ideal for me because it’s my primary publishing identity, while the others are mostly for monitoring.

Searches can be initiated at any time using a field intuitively placed at the top right-hand corner of the Seesmic window, but I couldn’t find any way to find trending topics. While I don’t generally have cause to check the trends, not having the ability to do so does rankle a bit.

Good-looking and Functional

This is the best-looking Twitter app I’ve seen on Windows, and possibly one of the best-looking Windows apps I’ve seen, period. Especially using a dark-tinted Windows 7 glass visual theme, it just looks designed to fit its surroundings, which is more than I can say for any AIR application.

The tabbed sidebar and light-colored stream backgrounds make it a very usable interface, in addition to helping with aesthetic effect. I would appreciate an option to turn on color-coding for @ mentions or conversations between two people you follow, but with columns designed for the purpose, I guess the Seesmic team figures that isn’t necessary.

Advanced controls for each tweet can be brought up by hovering over a user’s portrait, or by right-clicking on any individual post, so you have options in terms of replying or retweeting. You can also create user lists on the fly from anyone in your stream, or add people to existing lists, which makes it very easy to create functional groups quickly. You can even drag a user’s profile pic to the group of your choice to add them to it.

If there was a feature I’m missing most with Seesmic, it’s the ability to follow/unfollow people from within the client. It’s something I use regularly with my iPhone Twitter clients, and something I enjoy being able to do at a moment’s notice without visiting the web-based interface for Twitter.com.

Client of Choice for Windows

I won’t mince words: Seesmic’s dedicated Windows app has become my go-to software for using Twitter on a PC, even though bugs are present in the preview version. It’s just that good, and it’s not Adobe AIR. In fact, it might be reason enough for me to spend a little less time in OS X, and a little more time working in Windows 7. I’ll stress the might in that last statement, though. If you want a copy, for now you have to sign up for the Seesmic newsletter at Seesmic.com, but turnaround time for a download link seems to be less than a day for most.

Have you tried Seesmic for Windows? Let us know what you think of it below.

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e-tipi

“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”

It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi.

e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a workspace in which ideas can be born and explored. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. All of the ideas center around a central “challenge,” which the main problem or purpose of the tipi. Think of a challenge like a big picture problem that requires a multi-parted and multi-staged solution.

Along with your tipi page, you also get a unique email address that contributors can send their ideas to directly, for quickly adding to the tipi’s repository. You can also follow your tipi on Twitter, the stream for which is automatically updated with information of your choosing. I like both of these tie-ins, because they make e-tipi feel more connected with other networks, making it much more accessible, which is something I like in idea generation tools.

You can also export your data at any time as either XML or HTML, which makes it easy to plug into other tools, including database management software. It’s a nice way to help you organize the raw information you produce using e-tipi’s tools. A messy free-for-all is a good way to generate creative thought, but it may not be the best storage solution for more polished ideas.

Ideas are listed on their own separate page, and you can sort them by activity and date. Each idea listed shows votes for or against, total views, and the number of comments users have posted about each. You also get the idea’s title, its creator, any tags that may have been applied, and the status, if the idea has one. For each idea, an administrator can set the status to tell others how far along the process intis, using labels like “Accepted,” “Started,” etc. You can also filter your ideas list by keyword to narrow your search.

Each idea page looks a little like a Digg article page, complete with the text of the idea in question and comments made by other users underneath. You also get to see potentially related ideas listed at the bottom of the description page.

Other nice features of e-tipi include a tag cloud, and a member display, in which you can view a user’s profile information, and access information like how many ideas they’ve contributed to, including comments and voting, and how many documents they’ve contributed. You can also highlight certain areas in a Spotlight menu for quick access.

Overall, e-tipi is a very rough-cut tool, when measured against others I’ve tried in the past. It’s not exactly easy on the eyes, and at times it can even seem disorganized. Despite that sense of mess, or perhaps because of it, e-tipi does feel like something that could well operate as fertile ground for the generation and refinement of ideas. I like the sense of freedom inherent in the site, and the potential for unstructured, loose collaboration with a wide number of viewers.

Do you use a web app for idea generation and refinement? Which one?

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Twitt is a new, lightweight Mac Twitter client that has some interesting features I haven’t yet found elsewhere. Can it compete with perennial favorites Tweetie and TweetDeck, though? Using both those programs regularly has set my expectations fairly high, but Twitt definitely counts some surprising twists among its repertoire.

Good Things

Twitt displays your Twitter stream like an iChat conversation. It’s an interface that’s familiar to Mac users, and it fully supports themes, including user-generated ones. It comes with two, the default iChat style and an iPhone theme that is much darker. I still prefer the look of Tweetie overall, but having options is always nice, and some users will value it over other UI considerations.

I also like that there’s a compose window at the bottom, which you can optionally hide. It’s preferable to me to always have a field for posting in view, since I find it actually makes me much more likely to actually tweet on a regular basis, something which I find myself doing less and less of since I started using Tweetie as my main Twitter workhorse.

Filters is another thing Twitt has going for it. The app allows you, via a preference panel, to specify terms that Twitt will then look for in your stream. It’ll then automatically hide tweets containing said keywords, effectively enabling you to filter out annoying trending topics or ongoing conversations you aren’t particularly interested in.

Not So Good Things

I’m hesitant to say “bad things,” because none of Twitt’s features are set in stone, and these can still be changed in later editions, but as it stands, there are a few failings the program has mean I won’t be changing horses anytime soon.

First of all, Twitt only supports one account at a time. That’s good news for people who want to keep things simple, I suppose, but if you have more than one Twitter account to monitor or manage, you’re out of luck with Twitt. For my line of work, that’s a dealbreaker. You can log out of your current account and sign in with another easy enough, but why bother when other clients offer much simpler account switching mechanisms.

Second, there isn’t any mechanism for in-line viewing of conversations that I can find. Nor is there a means to view profiles, follow, or do any of the other fun stuff that I’ve come to expect after using Tweetie and TweetDeck for so long. Without these features, I’m afraid Twitt will remain little more than a quaint alternative for Twitter amateurs, instead of a fully-fledged professional tool.

Conclusion

If you’re using Twitter as more of an IM client and less of an RSS replacement and/or brand management outlet, then there’s definitely something to be said for Twitt’s simplistic approach. Things work as you’d expect them to in an IM client. Clicking on someone’s portrait enters their username into the compose field, so that you’re automatically having a conversation with that person. Ongoing conversations between others are highlighted (orange, by default) and stand out from the rest of your stream.

For my purposes, and I suspect for a lot of other web workers, Twitt just isn’t powerful enough to play with the big boys. But it does have the advantage of being free and easy to learn if you’re just starting out. Once you get your sea legs, however, I highly recommend stepping up to Tweetie or TweetDeck.

Which desktop Twitter client are you using, and why?

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I haven’t used Bento since it was first released, so a lot is new to me. For the purposes of this review, I won’t be detailing what’s changed so much as what strikes me as most useful about the program from a web working angle, since I imagine many of you will be new to the software as well.

The Basics

By default, Bento looks somewhat unassuming. It lists databases that already exist on your computer, whether you were thinking of them as such or not. That includes your Address Book contacts, your iCal events and tasks and your iPhoto library. It also lists a category called “Projects,” which starts out with dummy content for demo purposes. So, out of the box (pardon the pun), Bento is a convenient, all-in-one storage spot for all of your existing work and play-related Mac data that looks great to boot. But it can be more than that, too.

You’ll notice that in addition to the nicely-designed interface, the entry screens associated with items in your databases provide more customizability than their counterparts in the apps themselves. Address book entries, for example, can be browsed in an Excel-like list view, or in a grid-style view that’s reminiscent of one of the ways of browsing your albums in iTunes. Each entry has all the data that your Address Book card includes, but you can customize them further, adding photos, objects, text fields, or many other things.

Bento for CRM

That comes in handy when you want to use Bento as a CRM application. You can include details like known family members, business partners, and associates, all through your own custom fields. Add a preferred meeting place, best time of day to contact, corporate gifting schedule, or whatever else you may need to keep track off. Attach meeting notes or agenda files to keep a record of your interaction with said customer. It truly can be as powerful as you need it to be.

Bento for PM

As project management software, Bento is equally versatile. You can attach the same sort of custom fields to your projects here, and tie them to your address book and other collections for easy, single location access. If you need to open iCal or another app to check or change something directly, Bento can do that for you, too.

Keeping track of complex, multi-staged projects can be difficult, but Bento has a Smart Collections feature which should allow you to navigate even the most treacherous of prolonged endeavors. Set filters to catch all entries under a specific budget, for example, or by end or start date, or by the PM assigned to the task in question. It’s a great way to make sure nothing falls through the cracks without having to manually comb through every entry.

Bento for Everything

There’s countless uses of Bento for those working from home, so I won’t go into much more detail here, but it does feature handy, pre-made templates for time-tracking, inventory management, expense monitoring and issue tracking. It might take a little more setting up than tools designed specifically for those purposes, since it is made to be a jack-of-all-trades, rather than a master of one, but that also means it could become an end-t0-end solution for all of your business needs if you put in the time and effort to make it so.

Bento 3 is available as a free trial from Filemaker. The full version will run you $49.99 U.S. for a single user license, or $99.99 for a five-user family copy. Those who already own previous versions of Bento (either 1 or 2) are eligible for a $20 rebate. The way I see it, $50 is not a very high asking price for something that could easily do the job of three or four other programs, but try it out first to see if it fits your working style.

What programs do you currently use to manage your work-related databases on Mac or PC? Do you think pleasing aesthetics affect your database-related work one way or another?

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For a while, I’d sync Outlook and Palm Desktop, and then Outlook would update the BlackBerry (I didn’t actually use Outlook at all, it just acted as the middleman). It worked great. But then my dependence on Google Calendar  grew, because I could access it from any computer as well as my BlackBerry, and it wouldn’t work with my sync setup.

I investigated many tools and synchronization applications to find a perfect sync solution. I didn’t want to use lots of different applications to syncing needs.

The almost perfect solution was to find a dedicated synchronization app. Mine comes from CompanionLink. This method cuts out Outlook for good. CompanionLink now has a Google edition available that synchronizes all of Palm Desktop’s features with Google, too. For updating my BlackBerry, I use Google Sync for Mobile. It’s still not perfect, but it works and I can access and update my information in Google or Palm, while my BlackBerry just has access to the information.

If you’re struggling to find the perfect syncing app, here are some options (some free and some paid):

• Chapura: PocketMirror has been around for a long time, and syncs Palms with Outlook. Its Echo and PocketMirror work with Palm Pre.
• CompanionLink: Syncs Google, Palm Pre, ACT!, LotusNotes, Outlook and many others.
• Google Sync: free Google syncing applications for Mac, Linux, Android and others.
• gSyncit: Syncs Outlook and Gmail.
• Mark/Space: Sync apps for Macs.
• Sync’Em: Connects Macs with Exchange and Outlook.

How do you keep your data in sync?

Photo credit: djwudi

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What Concentrate provides is different than most apps, though, in that it takes as its core philosophy reduction, rather than addition or enhancement. It’s basically like a task scheduler that works similarly to Automator actions in order to provide you with efficiency-boosting shortcuts to setup programs, block web sites, and run and kill apps, all of which lets you focus on the task at hand. 

What Do You Want to Do?

That’s the question that drives Concentrate.The idea is that you set up “Activities,” each of which is comprised of a number of individual processes or sub-actions. An Activity could be something like, say, “Work on Novel,” in which case your the sub-actions could be to kill your Twitter client, block Facebook, set your iChat status to Do Not Disturb, and open WriteRoom. You can do that for an indefinite period of time, or if you like to set aside two hours a day for novel writing, you can add a timer to the Concentrate activity that will automatically remove the restrictions on what sites you can use when your chosen amount of time expires.

In practice, Concentrate works as I expected it to, and also performs some unexpected handy tricks, like hiding all open apps not directly mentioned in any of the sub-actions associated with the activity that’s running. It also has some preset categories of web sites to block, including a social networking group that probably eliminates 75 percent of the causes of my procrastination. Unfortunately, when it kills applications, you can always just reopen them. It’d be nice if you could actually block an app from opening at all, but I’m not even sure if OS X would allow that.

It’s The Little Things

Concentrate not only provides OS X users with an extra jolt of willpower, it does so with style. Little features, like being able to play a sound to signal the start or end of an activity, or continually throughout (a ticking sound in the example activity), or the option to customize the icon for each activity, really make me feel like Concentrate is something worth paying for. You might be able to duplicate most of the app’s functionality by creating your own Automator actions, but you couldn’t do it nearly as elegantly or with as much efficiency.

You can also integrate your own Automator actions directly in Concentrate, in case there are things the program can’t do on its own. A convenient menu bar icon allows you quick access to all of your activities, without having to access the main window, and Application Groups allow you to kill multiple apps at once, the same way you can with web sites.

Concentrate is free to try for 60 hours, which should give you plenty of time to determine whether or not you enjoy taking your marching orders from a piece of software. After that initial period, it’ll cost you a $29 one-time fee for a license, which comes complete with a money back guarantee according to their site. It might be a small price to pay if you’re having a hard time blocking out distractions on your own.

Do you use software to achieve singletasking nirvana, or do you rely on willpower alone?

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If you’d like to automate computer activities when you’re not near the desktop you’ll find many options in WinAutomation to help you. It can handle jobs ranging from running command line tasks to managing FTP activities and executing SQL statements.

The hardest part about getting started, for me anyway, was figuring out what to automate. This huge list of predefined actions contains plenty of ideas. I chose a simple task for my first test and converted a graphics and color-intensive email newsletter into a plain one. This took two macros to handle the job: one took out all of the graphics while the other removed all the formatting.

WinAutomation also succeeded in backing up my local drive to an external drive using Synctoy. While Scheduled Tasks, a Windows built-in system accessory, could run the backup, it had stopped working for me. WinAutomation is now running the job on a regular basis without fail.

You can also check out the list of ideas to see what you can do with the software. The easier example macros run applications and open specific folders. I already have a programmable keyboard that can do these things, but not everyone has programmable keyboard buttons. You can make can assign shortcuts or a hotkey to your macros.

Triggers fire macros in different ways. “Schedule triggers” run a macro on a certain date and time; they can also handle recurring tasks. “Event log monitor triggers” run when a certain event happens. The application can go to work to complete whatever activities you need done as soon as a specific process starts or ends. For example, if a job fails, you can set up a macro that will send you an email to let you know.

The support pages include macros you can import into WinAutomation, complete with instructions on how they work for easy customization. The export and import feature allows you to share macros with others. When I ran into a problem with one of my macros, I simply exported it to send to tech support, and received a response on how to fix it.

I imported the macro to automate Twitter updates from the web site, tweaked a few things and put WinAutomation to the test. It works well if you want to post a new tweet at the same time daily; all you need to do is update the text file with new tweets. While there are Twitter automation services like Tweetlater, using WinAutomation means just updating a text file rather than having to log into a site each time.

WinAutomation macros can use programming concepts such as variables, flow control, conditionals, loops and exception handling, and so can become quite powerful and complex. Power users and above-average users will benefit most from the software. Beginners and users not familiar with FTP, HTML and that sort of thing might feel a little overwhelmed, and probably wouldn’t have much use for automation software, anyway. Even I had to spend time debugging some macros that didn’t work the way I wanted. However, I found creating macros with WinAutomation took less effort than macros in Microsoft Office.

You can test WinAutomation free for 30 days to see how it works for you. The Standard Edition sells for $129 and the Professional Edition for $199. Volume discounts are available.

How do you handle repeatable computing tasks?

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Finally, as Simon mentioned last week, we Apple fans have got a Chrome build near enough completion to get worked up about. It isn’t anywhere near a proper final build, but it does work well enough that I felt comfortable using it to compose this piece. It’s good enough for most web work that doesn’t involve using Flash (which is almost all of it, in my case, I’m realizing).

The software is still prone to crashes, but the nice thing about Chrome crashes is that they stay isolated. Firefox still crashes on me with fairly alarming frequency (I’m using the latest stable build, not the beta preview), and when it does, it takes all 15 of my open tabs with it. Yes, “Restore previous session” generally eliminates any cause for concern, but I still find it irksome.

Chrome also feels just as speedy as its Windows counterpart (see Sam’s post “Latest Google Chrome Release Is a Speed Demon“), which is to say, it feels very fast indeed — faster than Firefox, and faster even than Safari, the latest build of which received acclaim for its speed benchmarks.

Some basics are still lacking, like the ability to print pages, and an easy way to fullscreen your browser window, but rather than hindering my workflow, these limitations are mostly just serving to illustrate how little I take advantage of most of these features on a daily basis.

A couple of crucial components still lacking in the test build are security and privacy filters, so if you are going to start using Chrome as part of your workflow, make sure to do so with that in mind. It’s probably to keep sensitive tasks and data relegated to the latest stable builds of Firefox, Safari and Opera. For more details and to download the new build, check out the official Chromium blog.

Have you installed Chrome for Mac? Let us know how you’re getting on in the comments.

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The price is unbeatable for lone freelancers and business owners, with a $0 price tag. If you work with a team that will need access to the software, it’ll cost 30 euros ($40) per user per month, with the first user free. Should the out-of-the-box package not have everything you need, Severa has add-ons available for a fee.

Severa succeeds in standing out from the field with one-click access to common features. The Dashboard (in the screenshot below) has a clean layout with good color contrast to help with quick scanning.

All of the fields, pages and drop-down menus are customizable so you can remove those you don’t need or add more options. Severa does a nice job of ensuring its forms display key information and limit the number of required fields.

You can search your data with keywords and limit searches to just one part of the application. Advanced search has a long list of columns to use as filters for searching. The right-hand side of the app holds a calendar and quick help box that changes based on where you point your mouse.

Viewing an account displays all of its contacts, cases and invoices. Like the rest of the app’s pages, the “Case” page avoids presenting too many fields. Cases come with a useful “Internal” tab for non-billable or internal work so you can track non-revenue producing activities. However, adding tasks to a case feels crude, as you can see in the next screenshot. It’s easy to make a mistake by not getting the format right. Those tasks are important when it comes to doing time sheets. The tasks will show up as an item so you can enter the time worked. This ties in with the invoice, which will reflect the time worked and the rate.

As an example, I created a new account called “WebWorkerDaily” (client) with Mr. Simon Mackie as the primary contact. I used this assignment in creating a new case from within the WebWorkerDaily account and referred to it as “Severa Project.” Adding the tasks came next, followed by entering my time for the assignment. So far, so good.

However, I hit a roadblock with the “Invoicing” and “Fees” sections. It took some experimenting before Severa finally spit out the invoice with the right information as it appears in the next screenshot. Once over the hump, I breezed through the application.

Severa has a sleek interface that lets you dive right in. It has a couple of minor obstacles, but so do most applications in this space. The CRM will suit those looking for a well-integrated and even-keeled solution, without feature overkill — it also sports LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Maps integration. Having CRM, project management and invoicing all in one app will make a lot of sense to many web workers.

The Finnish company’s software supports English (both U.S. and UK varieties) and Finnish.

What do you think of Severa’s CRM, project management, time tracking and invoicing solution?

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