I recently "Stumbled Upon this website supporting a very robust collaborative project and task management suite.
Project Desk is a WEB 2.0 online Project Managent software solution packed with all kinds of features including: Task Tracking, Automated Emailing, Threaded Discussions, Document Sharing, & Reporting. It is build around the concept of Clients, Projects, and Tasks. It support Time Sheets for tracking hours on multiple projects, creates customer invoices, and even has an online Time Clock where you can log hours by starting and stopping a virtual stop watch and logging your time as you work.
Project desk, won't replace MS Project or other PM Software for developing detailed work breakdown sheets and managing dependancies on large complex projects. However, even on very large projects, once milestones have been developed, work has been allocated and the team engaged
Project Desk starts to really shine enabling a collaborative environment for distributed teams to deliver the project.
I am using it to keep me focused and track my job search efforts, logging hours I'm putting into networking, searching job banks, interviewing and tracking all the pre and post interview correspondance and such. I can easily see how this would be useful whenever several people have to share work, track progress, and collaborate. Wether your a student working with 3 other classmates living in other dorms or working on a project with teams scattered around the world in different timezones. I would check it out - I have looked at a lot of online collaboration suites and this one is one of the best and I highly recommend it, though I'm keeping a close eye on google. Once Google Apps starts to allow sharing, delegating and tracking of tasks I might need to re-evaluate.
Free Task/Project Manager Supporting Team and Group Collaboration
Many people have switched to the popular web based email solutions like Yahoo and GMail, they are FREE and provide many features not found in most desktop email clients. However, they don't work well from inside Windows.
If you click an email link on a web page, or chose "Send Email" from word or many other desktop applications Windows will most likely start outlook, thunderbird or whatever you have installed as your desktop email client.
Affixa (http://www.affixa.com) is a free desktop program that nicely solves this problem, it allows you to use you web mail service from within Windows just as if it were a desktop email client. It supports drag-n-drop allowing you to collect documents, integrates with a number of file sharing hosts (allowing you to send large files), and a bunch of other featrues.
Free for personal use, a commercial licence is only ~$4/year.
Check it out.
Desktop Integration of Web Mail
Over 60 Free Webinars/Workshops in July!!! These free workshops span health, personal growth, business, spirituality and societal change, and are designed to unleash your full potential.
http://events.linkedin.com/MaestroMonth/pub/88291
really great stuff Check it out!!
Summary
INTERACTIVE LEARNING EVENTS WITH FAMOUS THOUGHT LEADERS
In July, we're turning the page on boring, passive teleseminars. In their place: rewarding, interactive learning events during which attendees interact with each other. It's called Maestro Month: a celebration of learning and personal development.
All month long, you'll have direct access to thought leaders such as Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson, Michael Port, John Gray, Neale Donald Walsch, and 60+ more. These free workshops span health, personal growth, business, spirituality and societal change, and are designed to unleash your full potential.
Don't have the budget for
QuarkXPress, Adobe
InDesign, or Microsoft Publisher? Check out Serif
PagePlus SE! Its a
backlevel version of
their commercial PagePlus X3, but is an
outstanding application that is very easy to use and loaded with templates. The free SE version
unfortunately is only available on Windows and won't run under vista. This is the only program I
truly miss since migrating to Vista
earlier this year.
If you need to run on Linux, MAC OS, or Vista and want the advanced features and
commercial output formats and are willing to trade off the steeper learning curve check out
Scribus. The documentation is great but it will take some time to master. You also need to use
GIMP or something like it for editing graphics, GIMP is an open source alternative to
PhotoShop/
PaintShopPro but that is a find for another day.
Free Desktop Publishing Program to produce everything from Business Cards, to Brochures, and mailings.
This suite of Free PDF Tools allows you tweak and edit the many PDF's you will likely create or receive now that you have an easy way to
PDF Almost Anything. Check out
PDF Fill Tools it is very easy to sue and has all the features you might need (split/Merge, reorder pages, rotate pages, add header and footer with page number, add watermark watermark and more..) you can read full details of all the features on their site
here. They even claim to support it, if you have problems but I have not tested it out.
I have the Full licenced version of Adobe Acrobat and I have not even bothered to install it on my new computer. I get 95% of the function I need from these tools. The only real thing I miss is being able to annotate the images with callouts etc, but its an easy enough workaround with these tools and image editor. My favorite image editor is my screen capture tool but that is a recommenation for another day!
One note of caution - they do bundle with with a Paid PDF Editor they woudl love you to buy and thre is no way to selectivly install or remove it for the novice. You can just ignore it, if you want to delete you will have to do it manually.
http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html
FREE PDF Tools
Ever want to do a survey to get feedback your goods/services, guage interest, or just about anything. Want a fully featured online survey tool that is FREE that does not put limits on number of invites, lets you download results, provides both anonymous and tracked surveys and much more? Here is a great free tool -
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/
Free Survey Tool
With so much of everyones critical information stored on personal computers especially for individuals and small businesses it is imperative you have a good backup strategy! What would you lose if your hard drive crashed? How would you recover your tax returns, customer invoices, address book, financial records, emails, customer presentations or your docteral thesis? You can get the applications again but if you lose your data it may be difficult if not impossible to recover.
There are a number of FREE alternatives that can provide basic protection of these critical files and information.
EMail - use a free online mail provider that gives you enough online storage to allow you save almost every email. I like
GMAIL however there are a number of other alternatives such as Yahoo, AIM etc.. You can continue to use Outlook, Thunderbird or your other favorite desktop mail client you don't have to use the WEB interface. If you go this route - I highly recommend using and IMAP connection as it mirrors all changes on each client you use to access you mail.
Local Backup
- Traditional Backup - GFI Backup (Formerly Titan Backup) is a great backup client supporting networked drives, automated scheduling and more has recently been released as freeware. This is by far the best FREE solution I have ever tried and is better than many paid solutions and certainly much better than the solution included in windows.
- Image Backup - Macrium Reflect is my choice here. Image backups differ from more traditional file backups is that they take an image of th computers drive(s) that you can recover to later. The advantage of this is that you don't have to reinstall applications. It used to be that you had to restore the whole image as the only option. Most of the contenders now allow you to Mount the images and virtual drives and recover individual files if you need to. I personally use Acronis True Image but its not free unless your lucky enough to catch it on Giveawayoftheday
Online/Offsite Backup - A wise man once said if its worth backing it up, back it up at least twice. What happens if your house burns down?
idrive Is one of the best free solutions out there is my favoite. It offers 2GB of online storeage that you can be expanded to 12GB by referring your friends. It offers a free desktop client as well as an explorer plugin so can your your online storage right from your desktop. There are many options for this service and it is changing quickly some are better at sharing, others give more space etc... - you can see some of the others including one with unlimited online storage here at a review I'm working on.
Free Local/Online/Offsite Backup
Do you have trouble finding receipts when you need them? Do you dread getting ready for your taxes because it means that you need to organize and total all of your receipts that have been piling up in your drawer?
Shoeboxed.com Offers a fabulous free service where you can email electronic or scanned images of your receipts and allows you categorize, store and access them online.
Premium subscriptions let you drop receipts in the mail and they will scan and load them for you!
Organize and Store your Receipts online
Looking for a way to communicate with a group or customer base? Consider an Email Newsletter, Group! Check out this review for some FREE options. You may want to look at
Your MailingList Provider Free Mailing List Hosting as it does not put any adds in your email newsletter.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/mailinglists.shtmlAndy
Free Mailing Lists, Email Newsletters & Ezines Hosting
Check out Ning
http://www.ning.com/ they allow you to create you own public or private social network. Its a great way for people to collaborate and share especially when you want to do it privately or have people you would like to include that don't want to be all out there on Facebook etc...
Create your own Social Network
Looking to share files, music, video, movies and just about anything on your computer. Free file sharing has been around for a while, but the stakes are getting higher. Some services offer UNLIMITED free Storage for file sharing.
One of the most popular offerings allow you to syncronize with your PC and keep the files current. Drop Box - Limit on the free account is 2MB
Personally I like Drop.io which gives you up to 100MB PER DROP with NO LIMIT on the number of drops and a host of features and unique ways to add and share your drop.
I just "stumbled upon" a new player competing for a free place to stash your files on line: MySites which is giving up to 10GB free storage. I'm just starting to play with it but I thought I'd Share it with our community of Freeware lovers.
MyBloop.com offeres UNLIMITED online storage - I have not yet checked this out and woudl appreciate feedback from anyone familiar.
Free Online Storage for backup or file sharing FREE!!
More than just business card templates, you will find a wealth of ideas/templates that can help you market and grow your business, plann wedding, or throw a killer of party!
Free Templates for almost everything.
Check it out! It is a gift from ACCA. The Italian leader in the building and construction software industry.
Share Price Lists, Estimates and Bills of Quantities but also to create, modify and share them freely for FREE
http://www.primus-dcf.com/en/Download/tabid/79/Default.aspx
Free Estimate, Price List and Bills of Quantities Program
My favorite is
gmail. Once I got used to the new paradigm of how gmail threads conversations and tags email, it is now my favorite. The new Themes give it a cool fresh look that even changes based on the time of day in your timezone. You also get all basics including lots of space, great search capabilities, integration with calendaring and much more.
What really sets it apart are some of the advanced features and the Gmail Labs applications and great spam filters. Some of my favorite advanced features:
- id+anything@gmail.com :: infinate virtual id's that you manage and automate your mail processing when combined with the filters and canned responses (auto responder. I use it to manage my vacation rental, when I get mail to my +seacolony tag it flags, it, tags its, responds with a message thanking them for their inquiry and letting them know i'll get back to them within 24 hours and more!! very Cool.
- attachment reminders - if you mention an attachment in the body but have not attached anything it reminds you to attach before sending.
much more!! check it out!
Free e-Mail
There are a number of Free office suites available. Most are built around openoffice.org. Check out
this review at
Gizmo's freeware
Best Free Office Suite
Google Galendar is Great. Google Documents are great. what could be even better?
Google Team Edition!
Integrated solution using Google Docs, Calendar and Sites. You need to have a common registered email domain to use the service.
You can always use these apps separately to collaborate but google team integration makes it even easier!
Calendar and Document sharing
You don't have to own a palm to use the desktop. You can download it from Palm or from
http://download.cnet.com/Palm-Desktop/3000-2094_4-10020951.htmlThere are also free tools to synch with online calendars.
You may also want to check out this article reviewing other options if this does not quite fit your needs.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-pim.htm
Free PIM with Contact Manager
drop.io offers both a teleconferencing number and voicemail as part of their free service.
freeconferencecall.com offers free conference call service that includes recording capabilities with a dial in for replay and an rss feed to share online.
Free voicemail and teleconferencing.
Free way to create a PDF from almost anyting! PDF is one of the most popular formats on the internet and great if you want to send the file you created to your friend with a MAC or a group of people you don't know, or heck you don't want people messing with your stuff.
My favorite solution (Free or otherwise - and I own a fully licended version of Adobe Acrobat that they sell for hundreds of $$$) is to use the PDF Printer Driver based creation tool. My favorite is
BullZip PDF. There are many alternatives out there - I found
this great review that weighs out the pros and cons of each of the main ones.
PDF Almost Anything
Shoeboxed - Manages and stores receipts and business cards. For free service you need to Scan/email yourself.
www.shoeboxed.com
Manage and Store Reciepts Online
eFAx provided a FREE inbound service with your own private fax number. This is only free for receiving faxes -- you will have to upgrade to a paid service in order to send faxes. Granted, each fax you send will only cost a few cents but this will quickly add up, especially if you send international faxes which have higher rates than domestic ones. So please be aware of this fact, free if you only receive faxes, not free if you want to send faxes.
You can FAX outbound for FREE via Fax Zero's service http://faxzero.com/. Note you are limited to 2/Day with a Max of 3 pages each. (unless you want to Pay)
Free Inbound Fax Service
There are a number of free alternatives to creating your own business cards. My favorites is Serif Pagemaker Plus SE. Unfortunatly, there is no Vista Support.
http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/PagePlus/Note if your unemployed a number of places are offering Free Business Cards - google for promotions or check with your local staples or chamber of commerce.
Free Business Cards (you have to supply paper)
