Online Collaboration tools to finish your projects on time and on Budget!
- Whiteboard
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- PDF Markup
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- Chat
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- Events
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- Sharing
Binfire's collaboration tools are dedicated to creating multiple communication, sharing and interactivity opportunities between users to enhance productivity. They keep you up to date and in the loop. For a project to succeed, teamwork and collaboration is a must. Binfire provides all the tools needed by your team to communicate, brainstorm and collaborate. As a project manager you get the tools you need to create a project, assign a team to each project, give permissions to each member, plan & track and deliver your project on time. Your team gets the tools they need to collaborate, communicate and finish the project. Watch the video to see how binfire can help your team be more productive.
Interactive real-time Whiteboard
Binfire's Whiteboard is a unique tool for brainstorming and presentation for your team. You can draw, write and paste images on the whiteboard where everybody on your team can see the changes in real-time. Binfire’s whiteboard is a real-time, multi user interactive whiteboard designed to help remote teams collaborate as though they are in the same room. When used with Binfire's chat feature or Skype audio conferencing, the whiteboard is an amazing productivity tool. Notice that the number of people collaborating on the whiteboard is shown on the top of the page and if you press it, you can see the names of all who are present.
Collaborative PDF Markup
The PDF markup tool lets you and your team to collaborate in real time using any PDF document. Just open the PDF file stored in you project folder by clicking on its name or icon. You will notice who else has opened this file at the same time. You or anybody else can draw or highlight on this document in real time and all those who have opened the file can see the changes right away. Use it with chat or Skype to maximize productivity.
Group chat
Group chat is another integrated feature for real time communication and collaboration for your team, contactors and customers. You can communicate with one or more people while moving from page to page. In addition you can always view your chat history.
Event Notification
All pages are live in binfire and get updated as soon as an event occurs in your project. For example if a file is updated by one of your colleagues in your project folder, you will see an update on your dashboard right away. Or if you are editing a task and somebody else opens the same task for edit, you both will see who else is editing the form.
Online Project management
To manage your projects you need the right tools. Binfire gives you all tools you need to manage and work on your projects. Break you project down to high level tasks and then breakdown each task to yet smaller tasks and so on. This concept called WBS is a powerful tool that provides good understating of all tasks in a project. Use the interactive Gantt chart to graphically view your project. Ask your team to write status reports at the end of every working day as to what they have done, what they will do tomorrow and if they are facing any issues which needs your attention. As project owner you can assign permissions to each member of the project as to what they can do or see in the project. This feature is especially useful when you work with contractors or third party providers.
Task management using WBS
The best practice for managing a project is to use WBS (Work Breakdown Structure). Divide your project to a number of high level tasks; divide each one of those tasks to smaller tasks and so on. This gives a top down breakdown of a project. For further reference on WBS check here: (http:// http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure) Some people call this process Mind Map, but we use WBS to describe task breakdown.
Interactive Gantt chart
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. To visualize your project and interact with it, an interactive Gantt chart is the best possible tool. Binfire's Gantt chart is an interactive representation of your project. You can change your project right from the Gantt itself. You can extend or shorten tasks, create or remove dependencies and record the progress you have made in a task.
Status reporting using secure tweets
An effective way of monitoring a project is to get the team together and receive status report from each member. In remote projects this is not possible. That is why Binfire has the status reporting tweet feature. This is a secure private tweet for your team. Ask each project member to report every day what he / she has done , what he / she will do tomorrow and if there is any issue that needs your attention
Control Panel & user Permissions
As the project manager you have full control of who sees what and has access to each element and page of your project. The project control panel is viewable only to the project owner at the beginning. The project owner can give full access permission to this page to anybody in the team, for example to the project manager. When working with contractors and outside vendors this flexibility is critical in managing a project.
Online Content Management
Binfire provides full file hosting and content management features. Every user has his / her own private web folder. Each project has its own project web folder which is separate from the user’s private folder. The online file browser is a full service file management system. You can copy, move, rename, tag and share files. In addition to these, there are special features for collaboration like file locking and file versioning.
Private & Project Folders
Each user has access to two types of online folders, private and project. Private folders are for storing personal files. Project folders are accessible by all project members and are used to store project files. Both folder types support full file browsing functionality in the file management system. You can create folders and upload multiple files at the same time. You can rename, tag, move ,copy, delete, download, share, lock and unlock files. In addition you can download all versions of a file and see its history.
File Operations
When several people are collaborating on the same file, if the right mechanisms are not in place, many version of the file are created and merging them into a single document is a huge challenge. That is why Binfire introduced file locking. While you are modifying a file use the lock, to make it read only. Nobody else can upload a new version and change the file while you are modifying it. When you are done, just unlock the file. All those who are working on the file get notified and can start updating the file.
Social Tools to enhance team productivity
We use web 2.0 features throughout the site to enhance team collaboration and productivity. The primary goal of social tools in Binfire are to let you find information you need fast and deliver (push) information and status changes happening in your project to you in real time with no delay.
Search & Tags
You can add tags to tasks and files. Tagging enables you to classify objects and then search for them based on a category. For example you can tag a task as a ‘bug’, a ‘feature’ or to give it priority. Binfire employs smart search to assist you in organizing your tasks and files. In addition to free form text, there are several keywords that the search engine understand. They include:
- Status
- Open
- Close
- User
- Any user’s name in the project
- Tag
- Any tag entered by any user in the project
- Task
- Name of any task in the project
You can combine keywords in search. As an example you can search for all open task, assigned to ‘John’ with tag ‘bugs’.
Starring to follow objects
Object starring is a powerful tool for collaboration. At the left side of tasks and files, there is a star which you can click on. When an object is starred by you, any change to that object triggers a notification email to you. If you assign a task, or a task is assigned to you, that task is automatically starred for you.
