weBlogs and project team management?

[archjake]

Is anyone out there using a Blog for management between team members?

We are looking for something similar to a Blog that team members can post to. If they post a file to our FTP site it would send an email out to all the parties alerting them to the update.

Because we already have a FTP site, I was thinking a weblog may work. Any thoughts?

[GuyR]

We are looking for something similar to a Blog that team members can post to. If they post a file to our FTP site it would send an email out to all the parties alerting them to the update.

A blog is based on RSS which is either a rdf or xml file and xml-rpc. Depending on what definition you read and what version it stands for RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. I take it the team are spread remotely?

Why send an email? If you update the rss feed then as long as they have their rss reader open then they'll see it. With rss you can set updating information in fields as well. Depends on your reader as to whether those fields will be actioned.

You could also try IM.

HTH,

Guy

[hand471037]

You may want to look into an on-line Groupware thing.

My Wife and I use Dotproject for our home business.

It needs a Webserver, PHP, and MySQL to run. Ours is hosted by our web hosting company. There's many different types of Groupware, however, so you should look at a couple. They all have issues, and take some setup, but a lot are Open Source and therefore Free.

It allows for Project & Task tracking, and files can be added to Tasks and/or Projects, and it can be set up to notify all people on that Task/Project when a file has been made.

It actually allows for milestones, calenders, events, Dependant tasks, shared e-mail address books, etc, etc, etc... it's great stuff. I have no idea what we did without it.

How's Tucson? I went to school down there at the U of A, and my Dad still lives in Az. My Wife and I were just vacationing at the Hotel Congress about a month and a half ago...

[archjake]

Dotproject looks interesting, but may be overkill. I'll read up on it as an option. Its not that our team is too spread out geographically, but we need everyone to be on the same page on a daily basis. There are close to 20 team members including the clients, and we have a tight deadline. When a file gets updated and posted, it would be nice for everyone to know this at the same time.


Tucson is good, it a bit cooler this week which is nice. I also attended the UA and graduated in 2002. I just can't seem to get away. Its a nice place to live.

[hand471037]

If you don't mind the monthly fee, there is a simpler solution called 'basecamp' that looks nice:
http://everything.basecamphq.com/

and they have a smaller verison called 'backpack':
http://www.backpackit.com/

It couldn't do a shared calender with Events which was the deal-breaker for us.

And we've turned off about half of Dotproject. It's modular, so you can do that. We're only using the Projects, the Tasks, the Calender, and the Address Book; we've turned off the Trouble Ticketing, the Reporting, ect. However, getting it up and running is a pain. You'd be best off getting an old computer in the office running an out-of-the-box Linux and then installing it on that (or one of many other Linux groupware solutions, like eGroupware or PHPGroupware), and even then you're going to run into some minor issues...

And Tucson is real nice, I left there in '96, and sometimes wonder if that was a mistake. Esp. when I look at housing prices in the Bay Area. ;)