Latest news from collaboration corner

Binfire has started their own blog called Collaboration Corner. It is a great resource regarding the project collaboration in general and binfire.com's news and plans in particular. Please refer to Collaboration Corner for all information regarding Binfire.

Great tools for project collaboration

In their latest release, binfire has introduced many innovative features which I will cover briefly two of them here.

1. File Staring; which makes collaboration around a file very easy. By staring a file, you are following any changes made to that file. Other people in your project can star the same file. This way a group is created around a file. Everybody is notified about the status of the file at all times. Assume you create a document and assign it to one of your engineers to make corrections. Your boss is also interested to know when the document is ready. When you upload the file, the system automatically stars the file for you, your boss will star the document too. Now as soon as the engineer is done his job (always the engineer :) you and you boss are notified immediately. This way you and your boss get notified on time, and the engineer does what he likes and nothing else (he calls everything else BS!).
2. User categories and permissions; The new release lets you create new user categories and give them unique permissions. The system has a few default catagories like manager, team member and so on. You can create supplier, customer, contractor or anything else you might need in you work. You can give each category its own permissions to the pages of you projects. You can control access to each page of your project with full access, read access or no access permissions. This way you control who sees what and can do in you project.

For a comparison of what binfire offers compared to the competition read binfire's blog Collaboration corner

Happy collaboration!

Binfire's New Release 3 leaves the competition in the dust!-Press Release

Binfire®, Inc., a project collaboration innovator, today announced the latest release of its project collaboration software. The new version includes comprehensive project management and real-time collaboration tools.

Binfire provides online Project Collaboration tools and services. It is the only company which provides all the essential tools needed for project collaboration in one easy to use package. “No other company in the project collaboration space provides the tools we are releasing today in a single package. Companies like basecamphq.com (37 Signals) and others don’t offer anything close to the complete package which we are offering for free. Compare binfire’s free package to 37 Signals’ paid package for $49 per month and you will notice that they don’t come even close! ” said David Robins, the CEO of Binfire.com. “In addition to real-time interactive whiteboard (which 37 Signals doesn’t offer), intuitive integrated group chat, tasks and milestones with dependencies (again 37 Signals doesn’t have this) and status reporting (nope they don’t have that too) we have added object staring (a real cool collaboration tool which they don’t offer), user defined categories for permissions (again they don’t have this feature) and intuitive dashboard to see the status of all your projects in one page. We have built a virtual project room that allows project teams to work online and achieve better productivity as though they are working in the same building”.

“Object staring for files and tasks enables you and your team to follow and keep track of any file or task in your project. This makes collaboration seamless for any size team. We use our own tools to manage our own projects. We use a combination of scrum and extreme engineering to release a new version of our tools every month. Our tools plus our talented engineers are the reason for being able to bring products to the market in the record time” Said David Robins. The new version also lets the user define project member’s category and give each one a unique permission. “This way you could define managers, team leaders, team members, customers or any other category you need in your project and give each category its own permission levels. This way, customers or consultants can have access to your project and only see the pages you want them to see. All other pages will be either read only or off limit to them” Said David Robins.

“We are offering our users comprehensive tools to manage their projects. Our competition’s offering are several years old and does not fare well against web 2.0 compatible solutions we offer for ease of use and intuitive collaboration. The new dashboard enables a project manager to see the status of all his projects in a glance. Currently all services provided by binfire.com are free. In the future we will have a combination of free and paid services” Said David Robins. Binfire uses highly respected Rackspace.com to host its web and file storage servers.

Contacts:

Email david@binfire.com

Web http://www.binfire.com

Phone 561-910-4567

Fax 267-545-5422

Interactive whiteboard

Soon we will release an innovative whiteboard as part of our project collaboration tools. This is an interactive whiteboard in which you and your team members can collaborate by writing or drawing in real time. What makes this whiteboard special is the option to open documents (images and PDF files) on the whiteboard and collaborate on them by using a marker, a pointer or any of the drawing tools available in the whiteboard. At the end of each collaboration session the content of the whiteboard could be saved for future use. We may let the whiteboard open other types of documents like Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the future.
Using the whiteboard plus the group chat will create an excellent collaboration environment in Binfire.

Best tool for project reporting

In projects small or large, project reporting by the project members is critical. Most project managers struggle with this issue during the life time of the project. Some methodologies like Scrum propose a daily meeting in which all members report:

• what they have done since the last meeting
• what they will do until next meeting
• If they face any issues

This good but has a few problems:
1-If all team members are not in the same building (or maybe the same continent) they need to use video conferencing and deal with time difference issues and cost of video or audio conferencing.
2-Manually keeping records
3-Make those records part of the project and make it visible and search-able.

At binfire.com we use secure tweets for project reporting. Each member uses this tool to report on what she/he has done, what will do next and if there are any problems.
All this information is saved in the project's database and is visible to all project members. It is also search-able, so the project manager or any team member can go back and review what was reported during the life of the project.
If you want to discuss this topic send email to david(at)binfire(dot)com

Coming soon to Binfire

We have seen great interest since the relaunch of the site! I would like to thank all those who sent email and had good things to say and those who suggested new functionality and improvements and those who pointed out to short comings.
A new version will be out before the end of 2010. In it, we have improved Tasks and Milestones greatly. We are adding task reporting mechanism and project progress monitoring. Now the project owner has more control over the project. The project overview and dashboard will have live links to events in the project.
In addition we are bringing new functionality.
1-Project chat- You can talk to one or all your project team members using group chat.
2-Interactive whiteboard- write, draw and collaborate with your team in real time.

We need feedback from our users. Let us know what is in your mind. What you like, what you don't and what functions you think we should add to the site.

Please remember, inactive free accounts will be deleted. If your account is not accessed in two months we will delete it (we will send you a notice first, but please don't rely on receiving a notice. Sometimes emails are lost or go to spam box etc!)
Best,
David
David(at)binfire(dot)com

Report issues or suggestions

If you encounter any issue while using binfire.com or have suggestions on how to improve the service please contact us at: support(at)binfire(dot)com
We greatly appreciate your help!