Buzzword Chasers

Another player has stepped into the ring of Online Project Management and Collaboration tools on the web.

Most of you are familiar with 37 Signal’s Basecamp, an amazing flexible and nimble Project Collaboration tool.

Recently we came across 5pm which is an intuitive web based tool for team based project management.

The first thing that caught our eye was the simple integration from Basecamp that they offer for doing an import and drop and swap for existing basecamp users looking to jump to another platform.

From a top level overview they focus on their ability to customize their interface while also having the following features:

• Email Integration
• Manage Projects and Tasks Online with a SAAS(software as a service model like basecamp)
• Customized Reporting and easy CSV export
• Track Time
• Interactive Timeline and Gantt-style view’s

What I liked most about their product was the ability to do a free trial without having to submit a credit card. I cannot tell you as a marketing consultant how frustrating it is to have to give your credit card out 100 times when testing new products that you end up destroying and having the fear of your card being in tons of peoples databases.

What systems does it run on?

5pm is operating system agnostic making it run fine on any flash-enabled web browser. This comes as quite a selling point for companies using both Mac and PC in their workflow processes.

5pm uses the same software as a service model as 37 Signal’s Basecamp only it packs in a number of additional features for a third of the cost.

How it differs from Basecamp?

37 Signals offers a very streamlined product where they focus heavily on removing feature bloat to make the system appealing to many types of usages from running a web design business down to preparing your grocery and daily to-do list.

Email Integration: Though basecamp will send out email notifications and give you the ability to reply you cannot send an email to a particular task or project for later assignment. As seen in the below you can easily send and receive correspondence and files into the system. This workflow gives a great advantage to the ability to streamline your client correspondence and feedback while still maintaining a separation between what your internal team and clients see.

Photo property of 5pmweb.com

• Flexible User Interface: This feature is super interesting for the different strokes for different folks appeal. The interface is a two pane adjustable interface that allows for some nice Javascript drag and drop effects. We haven’t heavily tested the trial yet but in the usage on firefox and safari on a mac it was running great. As seen in the shot below you can quickly add, edit, delete information and also reorganize how it is viewed depending on your style of information processing.

• Time Reporting and custom view filtering: As nice as Basecamp and many other tools are as an operations or financial person being able to drill down into reporting and see who and what is happening is very critical. 5pm has a very aesthetically pleasing interface and report generation which makes viewing things in browser or exporting to an excel csv very easy.

• Timeline View: Project Managers love to know about dependencies and how various tasks and milestones are connected to one another from a planning and understanding perspective. Basecamp lacks this ability but through their API outside developers have created projects such as Agile Agenda which allow you to connect to yourBasecamp or Microsoft Project to see Gantt charts and visualize time lines. 5pm offers easy dragging and dropping to dynamically adjust your timelines on the fly. This feature and visualizan is crticial for showing clients how their deliverable or a given halt in production can effect the outcome of a project.

Closing Thoughts:

We hope you have enjoyed this recent product discovery and we are curious to hear your thoughts on this product versus some of the others mentioned below.

Other Web Based Project Collaboration Products: