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I’m looking for a solution (or set of solutions) for a small business. I need things in two realms: group project management (notes, files, timelines, tasks), group calendaring.
Must be cross-platform, ideally with a web interface, but not web-only (Windows and Mac (and maybe Linux) desktop versions of clients with local replicas of data for offline use a huge plus). Mobile applications (iOS / Android) would be a huge win. I need to be able to get my data back out of the system in some usable fashion (which I think rules out Evernote Business).
I’m willing to look at breaking apart the calendaring solution from the project management & collaboration solution. I’m not completely opposed to hosted Exchange for calendaring, but there’s got to be a better answer, right? (If hosted Exchange is your suggestion, do you have a preferred provider?)
(And please don’t say Google Calendar. Just don’t.) (Ditto for Google Docs, and Google Drive.) (Not that the base functionality isn’t there, but none of the people who are going to be using this solution are fans of the integration, feature set, etc.)
I’ve sent a note to the Intellinote people asking if there’s any reasonable way to get my data back out of their system once it’s been entered. They haven’t answered yet, but it’s only been 20 minutes, in the middle of the night. I figure that’s ok.
Honestly, if I could get my data back out without exporting items note-by-note, I’d probably be pushing for Evernote Business, but alas. Or if Devon* had a groupware system (and was cross-platform). Has anyone tried Zoho Projects? Is it worth the price-point?
I greatly appreciate any suggestions that you all might have!
Holy crap. I received a response from Intellinote! Within 30 minutes!
Evernote lets you export all your stuff to an XML container. It looks like it’s possible to extract (most of) the useful metadata from that fairly well, so I wouldn’t rule it out (if it’ll do everything else OK).
Oh, hrm. I was seeing information that you could only export one file at a time, to HTML. If that’s not the case, awesome. 🙂
Yeah, I’ve not actually *done* it, but if exporting data is the only problem it’d at least be worth spending an hour doing a test export to enex format and taking a look at it.
Fair enough. I’ll weigh that in with the rest. Very cool. Thanks for the information. 🙂
Off the top of my head in no order: Trello, Slack, Asana, maybe one of the $10 Atlassian accounts (which gives you Confluence, Jira, and their version-control thing that my office doesn’t use).
Janice: Each of those has its ups and downs. Trello is handy, but has no calendaring. Slack is awesome, but isn’t great for things that are more long-term or need more process-driven environments. Asana is what we’re using now, and is the closest thing I think to what we need, but is fairly cumbersome. And dear Ghu, not Confluence/Jira. They give me hives. 🙂 (Yes, I know. Not a rational response, but it is what it is.)
I use Jira and Confluence somewhat. Jira isn’t great, but Confluence is true hives material.
The only other closest thing I can think of is designed for VFX primarily, movie production in general secondarily, and games third, and it’s expensive. 😀
Totally out of left field: Scrivener?
Liz: Does Scrivener have any groupy type thing? And, not all Mac users, which puts a kink in things. That does remind me that I need to dust off my copy, though. I’ve been meaning to try some writing during my insomniac periods. 🙂
I’m fond of Basecamp. Have you played with Slack? Ryan’s been hosting a group that’s messing around with that. I’m on Slack too but haven’t really expored it much. Neither has offline use, as far as I can tell, but I think Basecamp has good mobile functionality.
My office uses Basecamp as a project repository and Jira/BitBucket for development and ticket management. Basecamp sounds good for what you’ve described, apart from offline caching.