Filed under: Business, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Adobe, Commercial, Beta
Colabolo - beta collaborative task management
by Jason Clarke Jul 15th 2009
While it seems that task managers are everywhere these days, there's a good reason for it. Task management is all about working out a process for getting your tasks done, and there are a million different work flows. If you're not one for a regimented methodology like Getting Things Done, but need to implement a tool that allows a team to collaborate, check out Colabolo.
Unlike many collaboration tools, Colabolo is a desktop application, albeit one with roots in the web world. It's built using Adobe's increasingly popular AIR platform, which allows Colabolo to be a cross-platform tool right out of the gate.
Colabolo seems to be a hybrid of a traditional task management tool, and bug or issue tracking system. It looks like it could be easily used for the latter, but Colabolo's website seems aimed at positioning the tool as a collaboration tool for any business team, not just developers or IT people. The program takes an interesting approach to file sharing amongst team members; you can attach a file to an issue, and others on your team can download that file as long as your computer is connected to the network. This is an elegant solution for business customers that are co-located (and therefore on the same schedule), but could be problematic for teams that are geographically distant from one another.
Unlike many similar tools, Colabolo offers the ability to customize your team's work flow, and to have multiple work flows depending on what function is being tracked. So, for example, you might have a development work flow, but also an order processing workflow.
The product is currently free while in beta, but will be charging a low per-user monthly fee once the product matures enough to leave beta status.
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