Keeping your team on the same page, in today’s mobile work environment, is imperative. Office Medium is a new web-based intranet and social collaboration software that aims to help small business users do just that. We used the free trial to complete this review.
Office Medium provides an affordable and effective way for your company to maintain a central repository (aka intranet) of its documents, projects, staff communication, and client interaction, via a secure website. The small business owner that needs to keep a growing team of people, either employees or contractors, coordinated in one place will find this service useful.
If you have managed projects and documents by email and found it frustrating to keep up with the iteration of a document, you’ll like that you can now see the most recent copy. You can also see what’s going on with the project and everything tied to it from a simple dashboard. From task and event management, personal and group calendars, contact management, to file sharing and storage, this online intranet can keep you more organized.
You can organize around three different levels of user, based on what they have access to: Client, Employee, and Superuser. The client level access is useful when you are sharing documents and want the customer involved in the project process. They can see only what you grant permission to see. Employee access allows more access and interaction with company information. Superuser, of course, sees and manages everything, and you can have more than one.
Most notable areas that I liked:
- Super simple interface with all the key areas listed in the top navigation bar. You know immediately where to go to add a file, a comment, start a task or event.
- Latest Content: Shows you across the user base and across file types a brief summary of who has done what. You can also go into the User Browser section and drill down into each user’s activity to determine work completed.
- Attention: This is actually a subset of nearly every item, task, event, file, and you can let any user know that something is available for them to look at and they will see an “attention” note when they log in.
What they could have done better:
- I would like to be able to drag and drop the dashboard items into a custom view. For example, the status section is terrific for seeing what my team is doing, but it appears lower on the dashboard. I’d like to be able to pull that higher in the dashboard view without scrolling down to look at it.
- The second item is I cannot create a group of people. In most cases, I want a project to revolve around certain people and it would be nice to create a task and tie it to a group, versus picking one person at a time from my contact list.
Office Medium is best for small companies looking for an inexpensive way to offer employees and clients one central place to manage and share documents and communication on a project.
Learn more about Office Medium.
Massy
So it’s project management software basically? How does it compare to products like Basecamp?
TJ: I ask the same question, how does it compare to products like Basecamp? How about Manymoon, Glasscubes, Salesforce Chatter, etc?
TJ McCue
Hi Massy and Martin, great questions. I don’t set out to compare in these specific reviews, but I think the software can handle project management pretty easily. The difference I see with Office Medium is that it is a combination of project management and central repository.
Frankly, in my experience with many of these tools and services, it comes down to the small things that you like, versus what I like, in a tool. Often, this public discussion evolves into a private one and I hear lots of feedback in my inbox. Some people don’t like the way Basecamp looks and feels and works (to be fair a great many LOVE it), so they try Glasscubes or Office Medium or Office Drop. My goal here is to introduce you to one new tool and in the posts where we have 20, 30, 40 of a specific category to let you see the long list of who’s who and take a look at the market offers.
Mike
Hey Guys,
Let me first provide a great resource for you that will answer a lot of your questions. Business Pundit released a roundup and review of the top 10 business collaboration web tools. Not only did they name OfficeMedium the #1 application, mainly highlighting the amazing simplicity, but the article helps to show the similarities and differences of all of these services.
http://www.businesspundit.com/the-10-best-collaborative-web-tools-for-business/
I’d love to hear any of your thoughts about the list and how you think OfficeMedium compares.
Since you both asked about Basecamp, I’ll be the first to say that Basecamp is (obviously) 100% project management. OfficeMedium doesn’t really specialize in project management, but it’s perfectly capable of handling projects, tasks, events, etc – but in a much more simple manner. Most of the time, Basecamp’s functionality can be really over-excessive and you find yourself spending more time weeding through their software then actually getting your work done.
OfficeMedium is really a complete, flexible package for your business – a centralized way to handling all of your data – real straight-forward, and real simple.
If the roundup I posted above doesn’t answer your questions, please feel free to engage me some more.
Thanks for your interest!
I see the comments exploring additional areas beyond project management that may be necessary to help distributed teams collaborate. Would there be interest from readers in a collaboration suite that pulls together project management with document sharing, tied in with email, CRM, workflow etc.
Given the popularity of Google Apps seems SMBs are finally starting to go in the direction of integrated collaboration suites vs, just project management like BaseCamp, or Documents from Box.net, or Hosted email from hosted MS Exchange.
If there is interest please chime in, maybe smbiztrends would like to do a product review of the new HyperOffice version coming out later this month. It’s the biggest upgrade to a 10 year veteran in the hosted messaging and collaboration market specializing in SMBs.
Mike
@Shahab:
Minus direct email integration, what you described is what OfficeMedium does as well – projects, documents, crm, tasks, events, communication, etc…
I do agree with you about SMB’s seeking the ‘all-in-one’ solution.
Lynn
There is an important company missing from the list that we started using a few months ago DreSoftware.
The BCN DRE Software is web-based business collaboration software that can be set up by anyone without the help of It resources. I just found out they are now planning to add web conferencing in a future release.
We use the BCN to collaborate with our customers, prospects, partners and other colleagues in a secure, personalized work space. It makes me wonder what we did without it. They gave us a free trial we used for all kinds of business scenerios that have work really well for us. We keep finding more and more ways to use it. We have gotten very positive feedback from our customers and I think it has really improved our response time with the email integration. We have the whole team on the same page. I think we will see big cost savings once the web conferencing is implemented. We have CRM but found there was a big hole that the DRE software filled without having to download any software we can access from anywhere and it has helped us solve issues with our offices in different time zones.There is no limit on the number of work spaces our users can create and we have unlimited storage space for all the imformation we need to share.
5 star rating
Robert
Good article. Hey Lynn we also recently started using the DRE Business Collaboration Software BCN collaboration tool – DreSoftware.
We also found it easy to set up without the help of IT resources. I also confirmed they are now planning to add web conferencing in a future release. That is going to save us a great deal of our budget and it will be real nice to have the tools tied together!
We have found it’s easy to use, no IT resources required, cost effective, it’s building customer loyalty, great for teamwork. All positive feedback from users internal and external contacts. We reviewed several Business collaboration software tools and choose this one.
Robert
I just wanted to let you know that DRE Software BCN did in fact add web conferencing in its latest release. Having the products combined saves us a big chunk of our budget and the interface is very user friendly. They have a ton of features. They were recommended by Smart Selling Tools. The web conferencing is very easy to use. They offer a free 30 day trial which was plenty of time for us to figure out this was the product we needed. Good luck to all as your sort through the options.
Steven
Check out this website for a Business collaboration software
tool we implemented to help us drive revenue DRE Software. It’s a business collaboration and web conferencing all in one tool. This company really seems to get what it takes to Engage prospects, customers and business partners and build a relationship with our company using private workspaces.
We needed a supplement to our CRM solution, and DRE Software is one of the few technologies we have found that adds direct value to the client/prospect. Which in turns has driven revenue. It’s affordable and has saved us money on our
web conferencing budget. In the current economy how many business tools can you say that about.
With all the information available for sales, internal resources and the contacts along with email integration the decision to use this service was an easy one.
We did not have to download any software and it is very easy to use and customize your workspaces.
Nathan
How about http://www.sniget.com?
It’s very similar to officemedium but alot more powerful with its cloud application platform. And it’s completely free as well.
Jackson
We were pretty early adopters of BC for basic task management, but it was limiting in terms of flexibility. We’ve tried all the collaboration guys out and settled on Centroy.. The best part is being able to brand up the portal site, so your clients think it’s your own. Centroy also lets you customize your dashboard and turn off features you dont want in order to keep things simple. You get ProjMgt, along with a Wiki (awesome for training), file folder management and a few other features we turned off. We’re on the $49 plan and have almost all our customers on it.