Producteev, the task-management service that launched in private beta at LeWeb is now in public beta and anyone can sign up. I described Producteev as “Netvibes for group product management” because its dashboard presents a grid of boxes for each group task at hand. The public beta version now has a more fully featured activity stream that includes micro-messaging along with status updates, allowing team members to attach files and send direct messages to each other. The product is available in English, Spanish, German and French. And native clients for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Nokia are coming soon. (The iPhone app is awaiting approval from Apple’s iTunes Store).
The company is also now charging for three or more user, after a one-month free trial. Subscriptions start at $5 a month. CEO Ilan Abehassera is giving away twenty free lifetime “gold” memberships (a $79/month value) to the TechCrunch readers with the best comments about why they need to be better organized in their daily work. (He will reply to the winners in comments below).
Here is how I described Producteev when I first wrote about it:
Producteev starts with a grid of blank boxes on a Web page. Each box represents a different project to which you or other people you work with can add tasks. One box could be product development, another one could be a marketing project, a third could be an event. You can set permissions on who can see a given project on a box-by-box, project-by-project basis.
Each task has a status (pending, active, done, etc.). For any task, reminders can be set and comments can be added. Tasks can be sent directly to Producteev via Twitter, email, or IM (Windows Live, Messenger, AIM, or Yahoo Messenger). You can also be notified through these channels whenever a new task is assigned to you, a new task is added to a project, a comment is made to one of your tasks, or the status on a task has changed.
Producteev will be competing for mindshare with all the other online project management and workgroup collaboration tools out there, including Basecamp, LiquidPlanner, Yammer, Wizehive, Socialtext, and so on.
As a web marketer, I’m running tons of projects concurrently. If I never had to read another email and could stay on top of projects simply by glancing at my iphone, I’m sold!
I’m using Basecamp right now, but it just feels a little caged.
Between business and home my life is mess completely disorganized need some way to tie everything together through my my home work and I phone
I am a writer from Nashville working on a comic book project with an illustrator from London. Over the last year, we have never spoken by phone or met, but only conversed by email to develop this comic. As we get closer to completion, more and more details arise that hinder execution. I have been looking for project management software that can help streamline the process. If we could upload the art to producteev and both participate in the final adjustments there, it would be awesome. Please consider us for one of your free gold memberships.
Storyteller,
I invite you to check out FiveSprockets, http://www.fivesprockets.com. We offer tools and resources to help our users develop and produce their media projects, including comic books (as well as screenplays, radio plays, and theater plays). You could write your comic-book script, invite just your illustrator as a collaborator to the project, and the illustrator could then upload their panels as a storyboard for you to review.
Randy Ullrich
CEO, FiveSprockets.
So many of such kinds already exists. Let’s see what do they have to offer.
As an active software developer I’m constantly trying to keep in touch with independent graphic artists for my latest projects. Keeping things organized is a pain and with plans and details always changing it would be nice to be able to keep everything updated in one central place where everyone is always up on the latest details.
А bit buggy now
nice
I’ll be going back to get an MBA after 3 years of graduating from college. Getting back to being a student and having tests and problem sets, as well as getting involved in student organizations will require me to be extremely organized.
I really need a premium account to this service, because I spend all day signing up for new services I don’t really need, neglecting all the other tasks I should be completing instead!
If that’s not enough, I’m a total mess. I need good task-management!
I work for a small consulting firm that consistently has me working in many different groups and on many different tasks. We are not large enough to be able to assign staff to organize projects individually, so all organization is done by project managers who are juggling managing the project, completing their own tasks, and additional marketing responsibilities. An easy yet collaborative task management platform would keep projects on track and allow project managers to better monitor the tasks they have assigned and their budgetary constraints.
I work in the marketing department for a luxury real estate brokerage in Southern California, serving as a middleman between our team of graphic designers and the marketing coordinators at our 12 local offices. Despite the ailing real estate market, we are keeping busy with lots of new marketing initiatives, including a weekly magazine we publish and a new Web site. For years I have been using a proprietary Filemaker database to track and manage my jobs; however, the system was built years ago, is full of bugs, runs slowly and is just not very pleasing to deal with. Lately I’ve been using a supercharged Excel spreadsheet as a project management tool, but I’ve been looking for something more robust, full featured and collaborative. Since our marketing budget is a bit thin this year, I could certainly use the free subscription! This product seems pretty impressive; I’ll have to sign up for one of the free individual accounts in the meantime and check it out.
Hi Jason, you won one of the 20 accounts, please email me at ia @@@ producteev dotttt com
Currently using Quickbase to manage our main project and release schedule with at least two more major projects into the fold.
Quickbase is going to run us several thousand per year (and we’re only a small team). While it is efficient and reasonably easy to use, it does not work on mobile platforms well, is not specifically for project management and does not allow for live collaboration.
We are a small startup (flying under the radar for another week or so) and could greatly benefit from an integrated tool. Please consider us for one of the free lifetime memberships.
Hi there, you won one of the 20 accounts, please email me at ia @@@ producteev dotttt com
I’m a recruiter and i think this would help me tremendously. While juggling so many interviews, phone calls and biz dev I need all the help I can get. Especially in this economy.
Balancing my life as a CIO for a non-profit, a board member for local organizations, a part-time photographer, and a single-father of two busy children need a tool like producteev.com to keep everything and everyone in line. Especially with task update via Twitter and an Iphone client – OMG! This can be a life saver – thank you for your consideration.
I spend all my time reading techcrunch, and therefore need organizational skills
HELP!!! I have a couple projects that my boss keeps bugging me about. He wants me to account for how I plan to spend every single penny for a few trillion dollar budget. Aside from the money, his board of directors (over 125 million voters) wants a detailed plan for how I intend to do this efficiently. I have to present updates on these plans to a couple committees appointed by the BoD periodically and I don’t know where to start. Can you please give me a lifetime license? I’ve already promised all the money in my budget to some worthy institutions so I can’t afford to purchase a license.
I not only need this for my current job, but I have a feeling it will come in handy with my future job wherever that me be.
I looked at several property management software/SAAS solutions in Q4 and after using them did not receive the value, in reviewing this product, it seems that this is the perfect way to manage my team of property managers, share leases, check-in reports, communication with tenants and maintenance requests. I am a huge netvibes and iphone fan as well so these user interface options also make a lot of sense for me.
Hi Chris, you won one of the 20 accounts, please email me at ia @@@ producteev dotttt com
I don’t have a whole lot going on (work, girlfriend, dog, xbox), but always seem to be late for meetings, gatherings, paying bills…getting to bed. I need help…I need Producteev help!!
I have a team of 3 developers and 5 project managers. You would think with more managers than producers, things would flow smoothly.
Not always…
Producteev would bring us together in one unified place. That is the answer to my wildest dreams. Please, be my Pedro and make them come true.
Hi Darley, you won one of the 20 accounts, please email me at ia @@@ producteev dotttt com
We are a small land development company with offices in Calgary and Denver. Our team has been looking for better task management and project tracking software that we can use together and collaborate/coordinate our work. Several of us have iphones, so mobile integration in our ultimate solution will be very important for usability. Please consider us for a free lifetime subscription. Thanks!
Those of us who work at small companies (<50 people) have to wear many hats. It’s one thing to have a bunch of projects that you are working on but when they are so disparate and involve different people it is another issue completely. I manage the website (tasks), I have client projects (tasks), I help update our software (tasks), helping management (tasks), not to mention personal errands and reminders for family functions. Hopefully Producteev’s visual layout will help me keep track of a number of different topics simultaneously.
We’re an online education startup, and although we do a fairly good job communicating and staying organized, we are literally all over the world. We have people in West / East Europe and America all doing different things. Our biggest hurdle are time zones, and I think this software would really help keeping things on task and in order, and we’d love to try it out!
I am a newly appointed manager of an XRay department at a hospital. The overwhelming amounts of information, scheduling, planning along with the limitations of Outlook are making my work life a challenge. Producteev looks like a great tool to help keep me organized and productive.
Hi William, you won one of the 20 accounts, please email me at ia @@@ producteev dotttt com
After loosing all my data last night to a Drobo failure, my OCD compels me to fulfill a subconscious drive to organize something new (also therapy would be nice).
I have been recently unemployed I have just started my own business as of last Friday. I need something desperately to help me be better organized. I need to be productvee!
I am currently running several web businesses from a 50 sq meter apt in Paris while taking care of my 20 mo old baby girl. I need all the help I can get
I just recently got a job as a training specialist. This means that I now have to organize/create/track projects, as well as attend meetings, train a class as well as many other activities.
Any tool that streamlines and makes my new position easier would be fantastic!
I work every single day directly with my CEO and President. Our company is RAMM HORSE FENCING AND STALLS. We have an open, changing environment right now. We’re opening in a month or so a new call center about 1 hour away – and I am in desperate need of an organizing overhaul. We also are looking at a desk plan like that Dave Ramsey’s group in Tennessee has used.
I’ve looked at listphile, producteev, and a hundred other sites. I need to have producteev like an adict – I have been jonesing for two days just waiting for an invitation to even TRY this in Beta.
Okay. Here’s my pitch. I am trying to organize our daily workflow on multiple levels, with mulltiple departments like sales, wherehouse, shipping, design – I’m trying to organize out of control projects and emails with management side – and I need, I NEED this website badly. I am the V.P. of Marketing and Advertising and must use producteev asap. Thank you.
There are times in our lives when all needs to be taken care of. I’m currently in this phase where I handle too many projects at the same time, from small 2 day thingies to business conferences I help organizing or amazing ideas that I want to turn into real products and services. With our 1-year old baby, there’s not enough time in the day to manage everything, and of course, priorities are always to be changed in order to accommodate my private life. Having a tool such as Producteev would definitely help me organizing my professional life and maximize time with what matters the most, my family.
I need to manage my development team when I am in the office and when I am in the field talking to people. This allows me to be in control of the different projects and to know exactly where things are at any moment. Producteev offers me the best solution to do just that. Engineers love it because it is intuitive, non-intrusive, fun without being an overkill (by demanding too much work from them). I would love to be able to use my BB with it, but I am sure this feature will come soon.
From past work on webware projects, the single greatest development hurdle I’ve had is managing client expectations and keeping within scope. Inevitably, by the time you finish the features the client wanted, they’ve decided they want something completely different. There may not be much productivity software can do about, as it’s probably more relevant fodder for a psychiatric health professional. Nevertheless, little things like having project scope laid out and visible to the client at all times, and having the ability for a client to submit changes that must be approved before being added to the project scope would help provide a more cohesive experience for the client and lead to less scope creep, I believe.
Looks like Producteev is very promising to manage in a fast and reliable way a team of 10-20 people. A lot of people is realizing email should be used for what it is meant to be useful for: sporadic communication mainly external to your organization. Collaborative software like Producteev can help to assign tasks and track their status and send related information to colleagues presenting it in a coherent and intuitive way. Messaging and commenting is also central in keeping a fluid communication between people. My simple point: the challenge of collaborative software is help people in organize tasks, track the progress and permit the related information to flow smoothly between the team members (while ensuring data portability where needed of course). The benefit of improved awareness and flow of information in everyday work will help to save time and save the stress from redundant or confused communication.
Juggling my own website, a consulting business and acting as a contributing write to several sites I’ve got many balls in the air. Add to that that I’m a father to three kids and am actively involved in their daily lives, every minute counts.
I do a pretty good job managing it, but I realize I could do better. Every hour of work time is extremely important so if I had a better tool to manage my workflow I know I could make every hour cont even more. Would love to give Producteeve a shot, and if you chose me as one of the lifetime slots I’ll be sure to report back here (and on my blog) after using it for one month to say how it changed things.
Web and social media Integration are vital components of an organizational strategy to tie together multiple websites, locations and venues for WaterSports and Promotional activities going forward. I have been looking at Other aggregators and ways to link together data concerning the business and its web presence. Its daily schedule and a central data distribution point. Producteev looks like a potential solution to effectively and rapidly distribute media in the form of daily brochures, specials, pictures and videos as well as providing a collaborative platform for the exchange of activities and ideas for the disparate needs of the tour and activity coordinator / operators.
I’m working with multiple projects, each one is in a different language with their own particularity and my agenda is always full 2 weeks from now. With the benefit of organizing myself, I won’t need to go home too late everyday.
Suddenly, I was tasked with more responsibility. Last week, two employees were released from service. At this time there are no replacements which means that not only do I currently have to manage all of my responsibilities, I have been given additional areas to manage. I work for a non-profit organization who serves over 1200 people weekly and staffs 5 full-time employees (down from 7). I manage, or am involved in managing, over 7 different groups. I am also our webmaster and IT department.
Currently, I’ve been using a number of tools, but have relied upon Things for my task management/project tracking solution. In order to continually stay ahead, and to anticipate the challenges of tomorrow, I need to be able to quickly deal with those of today. To be able to communicate with team members using a central hub and to administer different types of events, tasks, and projects would be invaluable – something that my current tools are unable to accomplish.
Bottom line: I will use Producteev and as my workload is unlikely to decrease, I will use it at least 6 days a week.
Have you ever had the joy of Geek wrangling?
I am the Executive Producer of a small, community access and Internet television program called Geeks With Issues. We engage in discussions of topics that are of interested to the so-called “geek” culture – conversations and opinions of games, movies, TV, comic, books, technology, the internet and more are the bread and butter of this show. We’ve also established a website/blog, so that we can continue communicating with our fans in between productions. It’s a project that we hope will some day expand from a hobby to an lifestyle.
However, before we reach that point, we need to grow. We need to coordinate, and communicate. We need to follow through And geeks, except in their spheres of specialty, are notoriously bad at doing all of these things. Getting people to come together and prepare this month’s scripts, write stories for the website, and plan for our several on-location shoots every year is hard enough. Add to that day jobs, relationships, children and social lives, and you have a coordination disaster. Like herding sheep with no dogs and a blindfold, geek wrangling can be quite a task.
But that task could be made easy by Producteev. Having access to such a powerful software solution would allow my director and I to bring together our Geeks, and produce more content in an organized way. The ability to use multiple forms of communication, social and otherwise, let’s the Geeks coordinate on their own terms, instead of forcing them into a mold. And maybe…just maybe, it will ensure that we get some productivity out of a group of greatly overworked, underpaid and inherently unmotivated individuals, helping us move from concept to creation.
Producteev could make the concept of geek wrangling obsolete. And that’s quite a task in and of itself.
I am a Systems Administrator for a small rural critical access hospital. We will be beginning implementation of a Electronic Medical Record system within the next 3 months. Producteev would help us manage this project more effectively. This project is going to last at least 2 years and affect over 200 employees. It is going to be very important that all tasks involved with the project are managed and communicated well to insure that the implementation goes as smoothly as possible. I have gone through the Producteev tour, and it looks like a product that would help us immensely.
Andy,
Is Producteev’s low cost the main attraction factor for smaller hospitals?
I am working with a few CAH/Flex rural facilities and while they will like to start an EMR initiative, they are incredibly challenged in terms of their finances – at least here in Calif.
Rural hospitals – especially Critical Access Hospitals (CAH) don’t make as many headlines but will become increasingly important.
Perhaps Producteev can show off your work as a case study.
Atul
Hi Andy
You won one of the 20 accounts, please email me at ia @@@ producteev dotttt com
For me it is all about balance and time. Balance between managing projects and getting things done. Team projects are about communicating and doing. Everything vies for your time and time is a limited resource. A tool that helps to make communications more efficient creates time. It must be simple to use and seemless.
In large part I try to employ David Allens GTD concepts and have tried numerous GTD Apps; currently Nozbe. I use Merlin Manns InBox Zero as a method for managing email. It seems that when something works well for the team it fails for the individual, when it works well for the individual it fails for the team.
I work with Start Ups and in doing so must wear many hats. I need a flexible tool that allows me to manipulate lists, and process and track information in a way that makes sense to my workflow. I would love something that is more seemless, something that creates more time than it consumes. It seems that Producteev will do this.
Nice post! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
As a bus dev guys who’s also managing acquisition projects, I’m always juggling between 10 to 15 projects live at the same time. The team which is 4 is always sharing thoughts and updates on projects and right now, we’re switching between Outlook, IM etc. The idea of having a single platform for all of that is very dreamy. I also like a lot the drag and drop functionalities etc.
Collaboration, project management and coordination among team members needs to be:
- Intuitive
- Unintrusive
- Ubiquitous
- Real-time
It definitely looks like Producteev brings all three requirements and bundles them into one complete package.
The UI looks easy to use and its integration into other services and 3rd party apps addresses the unintrusive, ubiquity and real-time requirements. It looks like Producteev can be easily merged into my more of working.
This is the kind of service my team requires to further improve communications and overall agility. I most certainly can put it to good use.
Hi Luis, you won one of the 20 accounts, please email me at ia @@@ producteev dotttt com
As a small business owner doing several web based projects I have yet to find a system that meets my needs. I have tried every system I could find but in the end, the only ones worth using are ones we cannot afford at the time.
Keeping our projects, tasks and related data organized is really crucial to success and Producteev is one of the best solutions I have seen. I would love to be able to switch my business to it.
2 toddlers, full time job and a side job (web page author) – enough said. Chaos.
** Why to be better organized in daily work **
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The element of time with respect to Supply and Demand. Today matters more than most acknowledge, because if we take “time” to stop and think about it . . . after today we will have one less day to live our lives.
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For the terminally ill and those with only months, weeks or days left to live, ask them about the value of time. For the rest, we really don’t know how much time we have . . . and yet it is all too common for us to take our time for granted . . . to waste some here and there . . . to not give our family and freinds the focus and attention we should (and someday will wish we would have).
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The Supply of Time is limited and the Demand for Time is high . . . so how we set ourselves up to spend our time, to position ourselves to experience the best life we can . . . everyday . . . in this context . . . is borderline priceless.
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The same goes in business or for any organization. Whatever the goal . . . the goal by its very nature is of value. What if you could attain that valuable goal, that valuable experience, those valuable results in 9 months and be realizing the benefits that compelled the goal in the first place. Okay, now consider the impact achieving that valuable goal in 6 months or even 3 months . . . imagine the opportunities . . . contemplate the level of progress . . . now you see the benefits of the highest standards of communication and organization . . . and understand why so many individuals are creating soltuions in this space . . . it can literally change your life.
I am willing to provide unbiased reviews and use Producteev in real world scenarios.
Can I get an account?
Some words to expand my previous comment:
Milestone Billing, Deliverables, Timeframes, Tasks, Engagements, Change Control, Exit Strategy, Professional Services Billing Statements, Gantt Charts…
Save me from MS Project!!!! My Daughter’s name is Jazmin.mmp….that should tell you enough.
I need to be in the cloud!
As a freelance web developer, I receive as many as 30 tasks via email and 10 direct requests via phone. I currently use Gmail as a main source of task management (using labels and colored stars).
I’ve tried using products like Eventum but they are geared towards group project. I need a better way to manage multiple tasks from many different clients. Producteev, please help!
I’m a university student who is also attempting to develop a website based on time management/prioritization.
It’s ironic since I spend hours a day working, and I cannot seem to ever get my tasks in order. If I had a lifetime membership, I could stand on the shoulders of giants, and help you make the world a better place.
For most people, the first step to any project is to get organized. For others, like me, that first hurdle can seem insurmountable. Projects fail before they truly start or deadlines are pushed back and missed as we try to weave our way through the work flow without a road map.
I’ve tried many of the free organizational web apps with some limited (though encouraging) success, but I’d appreciate a chance to use a full-firepower project management tool like Producteev.
i dont even have a home..i need this so that i can show off