Challenges can pop up when trying to compete with the big fish. In order to stay competitive, it is necessary to use some of the same tools that the big companies use. However, most small businesses do not employ an entire marketing team to help with this process. In many cases, there is no marketing team at all. Thus, when looking for software to help with the marketing aspect of the business, the easier it is to use, the better.

Below we review one such service: MailerLite.

What is MailerLite?

MailerLite is a new email marketing service developed by a UK company with an aim to allow small businesses to compete with bigger counterparts in a user-friendly manner, minus the massive investments of time and money.

Although this email marketing service does not have all the bells and whistles that some of the bigger systems have, it has been tailored to adequately meet the needs of small businesses, without the large cost that goes with some of the other products on the market.

Features at a Glance

MailerLite provides a user friendly tool that is perfect for new companies and small businesses. Its inherent features make this product pretty easy to use:

1. The drag and drop content editor offers several styles and colors to personalize your emails and newsletters. I like how easy it was to design an email with my colors and header.
2. MailerLite displays well on computers, tablets, and phones. It looks great in any e-mail system and on all mobile devices. I pulled the email I designed up on my Android and it looked the same as it did on my laptop. This is a neat little feature.
3. Anybody can use this system. You do not need to know HTML to design a professional looking email.
4. MailerLite makes it simple to manage subscriber lists. Duplicates, unsubscribes, and bounces are handled automatically. And, it is easy to manage multiple lists. The system offers a subscribe form for your website and allows you to manage subscribers with API.
   
   
5. MailerLite is fast. The system is capable of sending out over 1000 emails per minute and it automatically handles delivery issues.
6. There are several analysis tools built in so businesses are able to track views, clicks, opens, bounces, spam reports, and unsubscribe reports. These tools are in place to help businesses provide effective emails to subscribers.
   
7. MailerLite caters to small businesses with the goal of making email marketing easy. The system allows personalization of emails that uses the registered name in the email, which is much more appealing than “Hello Subscriber.”
   
   

Affordability

The program provides an affordable option for small businesses. Let’s face it, small businesses have a limited budget for marketing tools. The other difference between big and small businesses is that the latter do not necessarily need all the tools that are built into products designed for their bigger counterparts.

The good news is that this product is affordable at $99 per year; pretty cost-effective as compared to some of its bigger competitors. MailerLite allows you to manage up to 10,000 contacts with unlimited emails.

MailerLite is in the process of increasing subscribers and services over the next several weeks. The cost for an additional 10,000 subscribers will be $100 per year. An additional 20,000 subscribers will cost $199 per year. This will include unlimited email capability, as it does now.

You can try the service for 30 days free of charge. They do not require credit card information during the trial period. Thus, you are able to use the product for an entire month before making the decision of whether or not it is for you. Oh, and signing up for the free trial period was extremely quick and simple.

Room for Improvement

MailerLite is a functional tool for smaller businesses that is easy to use. However, as the name states, this product is in the light weight arena. It does not compete with some of the heavy weights in the email marketing arena. This program does not offer all of the automation that some other systems offer. Let’s take a look at the cons.

1. There is no auto-responder option in place at this time.  However, they are in the process of developing a system that fits in with the simplicity of this product.
2. MailerLite does not offer automated list switching based on specified criteria. In other words, if you have somebody who has subscribed to your email list and has not purchased anything they are on the “free list”. When they purchase something, you might want them on the “customer list”. Some email systems do this for you automatically. MailerLite does not have that capability at this time.
3. You cannot send plain text emails with this product. It is necessary to use the automated system to design an email. Thus, if you are looking for a system that will allow you to send out plain text emails, MailerLite is not the right system for you.

Is MailerLite Right For You?

If you are looking for an email marketing service that is easy to use and is affordable, you might want to give it a try. This system has been designed for small businesses looking to get into the email marketing arena quickly and easily, without hiring a professional to do so. MailerLite is a one-stop-shop for designing eye-catching emails quickly and easily with a simple drag and drop system. There are nice analysis and tracking tools built in as well.

However, if you are searching for a system with all the bells and whistles that will automate and track absolutely everything for you, this is not the right product. It is important to remember that this system is capable of handling up to 10,000 contacts. If you have more number of contacts than that, you might want to consider another program.

The 30 day trial period gives you an opportunity to give the system a try for free to see if it works for you. The simplicity of the system is a great feature and it allows small businesses to compete with larger businesses in the email marketing service arena.

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7 Websites to Help You Organize Your Life

Fortunately, the Internet provides help in the form of websites.

1. Orgjunkie.com

This website is like a clutter-busting boot camp and this doesn’t not only include the pile on your desk. Orgjunkie helps you in recalibrating your views and practices on how you organize yourself and remain stress free. Whether it’s the storage solutions that you need, or help in organizing daily or weekly menus or it is managing your calendar, Orgjunkie has it all. Undoubtedly one of the best websites to help you organize your life!

2. 30boxes.com

It would not be wrong to term this as the king of online calendars. 30boxes.com allows you to publish, collaborate as well as share your personal schedule/calendar with anyone you want. It is very user-friendly and is much more visually pleasing than the messy and jumbled family calendar hanging on your wall. It is an effective tool to help you stay organized and remember all your important events and tasks. Another solid feature of this website is the ability to upload and share pictures, which come in handy to people who prefer to remember things visually.

3. Bundlo.com

Bundlo is a way to bundle and organize events and milestones of your kids. It lets you capture and upload precious life moments of your kids and organize these pieces accordingly. It helps you organize and maintain an online baby book which has up-to-date information on all aspects of your child. Create a vaccination calendar and doctor trips so as to maintain the entire medical history of your child for an easy reference by any doctor. A great website to stay organized for any parent!

4. Organizedhome.com

This is a no-nonsense site which offers a practical guide to cleaning and de-cluttering your life. It is a great place to begin getting organized and help you manage your time as well as money apart from, planners and calendars, menu planning and printable checklists and lots more. We think it is very elegantly designed and easy to navigate with straightforward tips on getting organized in life. Another resourceful website to help you stay organized!

5. Cozi.com

If you have a chaotic and hectic household then Cozi might be of great help to you. It is completely free and offers a multitude of options for users to get organized. The shared family calendar feature is a great way for the entire family to stay connected online and easily keep track of what everyone is doing and where and when everyone is supposed to be. You can create to-do lists and shopping plans too. A great way for the entire family to stay in tune to each other’s lives!

6. Springpadit.com

Springpadit offers quick and easy ways to save and store anything worth remembering — from ideas, phone numbers, notes, photos, recipes you accidentally find online and even barcodes of items you want to buy. View this as an online notebook where you can scribble anything. You can even partition your life into different notebooks like home, office, school, vacation, shopping, fun, friends etc and keep writing into each of them. There’s a digital inspiration board where you can visually organize a lot of things like your backyard design etc. Springpadit is a practical online tool to help you stay organized no matter how chaotic your daily routine.

7. Flylady.net

This is one of the oldest websites that has been helping people get organized for so many years. One of the best features of Flylady is its system works in a step-wise manner. So you first learn one thing about being organized and then another and so on. It is like having a great friend who is with you all the time, who keeps tabs on all your activities and events. A solid website that can help you organize your life!

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Getting and organizing your life takes time, patience and determination. It is rather imperative to focus on developing this critical quality whether professionally or personally, won’t you agree?

What are your tips to organize your life?

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Did you teach a course to a group recently? Have you ever made a presentation before your co-workers? Do you usually write and distribute reports? If yes, did you bother to ask your colleagues their feedback or opinion about how it went?

From a more commercial or business perspective, do you ask your customers their opinion about the products or services you provide? Do you have some sort of standard questionnaire available to your customers?

Asking for opinions, feedback, gathering assessments about your work constitutes, in my opinion, the most powerful tool in our way to excellence.

If your answer has been no, trust me, you are losing out on a lot of information that your colleagues or clients would gladly provide you. Remember: no questions asked, no answers given.

Why You Should Ask for Feedback

There are several reasons you should ask for feedback about your job:

Reason # 1. You will know in which places you’ve failed or points to improve. How else do you expect to know how to do better the next time?

Reason # 2. You project great professionalism.

Reason # 3. You will earn some points with your bosses. If you work in a corporative environment, your superiors will see in you a professional who cares for making a better job each time.

Reason # 4. Having others’ opinions will strengthen your arguments and will help you to easily communicate with your collaborators of what exactly is expected from them.

Reason # 5. When you send someone a feedback request, you make them see that their opinion matters to you; establishing that type of relationship in a professional environment is very important.

Reason # 6. Feedback is a way of contact. When somebody answers your feedback request, a new level of contact is being established, may be one that did not exist before. In other words, you are establishing an honest and productive contact with other professional or customer.

Make Feedback Easy for Everyone

The simplest way of getting answers is through a questionnaire, and you don’t need a master’s degree to design one: A simple scoring field from 1 to 5 and another one for comments is more than enough to know the assessment on each aspect you wish to know (quality of the materials, seminar extension, etc).

Distributing the questionnaires in paper is one option, but it would definitely be simpler for everybody to use online forms. Also, you avoid transcription mistakes in the results, there are no geographic limitations and you make it possible to obtain answers faster.

Tools for Generating Online Forms

There are tools that facilitate creating surveys as online forms which can be filled out through a web browser. They also allow to customize the look of the forms and questionnaires and to easily integrate them to the web.

You have tons of online tools; the one I’m presenting here is HTMLform.com that together with WordPress allows you to create and present questionnaires in an elegant and very simple way, with professional results. It is also 100% free.

What Is HTMLform.com

HTMLform.com is an online application that allows you to generate forms and surveys with features:

1. Once you have designed your form or survey, you get a downloadable file to make it work online.

2. There’s no need to log in and it’s completely free. Because of this, there’s no need for you to get any license or to convince your purchase department of doing so.

3. The data is stored on your company’ server. This is something important since a lot of people are reluctant to using online services and sharing their personal information because of security and privacy reasons.

4. Once you install a form or questionnaire, you have an interesting tool for visualizing data that will even show you bar charts to summarize the different appreciations, which will make the results much more understandable. You may also export the results to a spreadsheet.

5. You can receive notifications via e-mail instantly with all the data is completed by those who polled. Likewise, those who polled can receive the confirmation of the delivery of their data.

6. You have a support forum to solve any issue.

Why Combine with WordPress

You can install the forms and surveys generated by HTMLform.com on any web or corporative intranet. You don’t need any content designer or specific software for this.

1. Installing the forms over WordPress is the simplest and fastest way offered for those who don’t have technical knowledge to publish and manage as many questionnaires as they want with complete freedom.

2. WordPress admits endless possibilities. You can use it solely to present the questionnaires in independent pages, though it may be very interesting to publish the results of the surveys, complementary information, etc.

3. You can give your WordPress page the style you wish, thanks to the huge variety of themes it offers. If you are going to use WordPress exclusively to publish your questionnaires, my advice is that you install a free distribution theme that is as minimalist as possible, like Modern.

Publishing and Distributing Your Survey

Perfect, you have created your first questionnaire, you have downloaded it to your computer, you have your WordPress ready with your username and administrator password, you have installed the questionnaire adding it as a plug-in and you have published it in a post or page that you’ve named “Satisfaction Survey: Seminar”.

The only thing left is to send the URL to each one of the addressees of the questionnaire from the WordPress page where you’ve published it. For this, you may use e-mails or any other means your company uses, like collaboration tools, instant messengers, etc. . . and that’s it!

As you receive the results, you’ll be notified via e-mail and you may check them in the statistics page. If you want, once the reception time is over, you may publish the results in your WordPress.

A Word on Questionnaires for Feedback

Based on my experience with surveys and questionnaires, I would like to finish this article with some simple advice:

• State the reason of the survey. Dedicate some lines to explain why you need to make a survey. You may include this in the e-mail where you send the questionnaire, in the questionnaire itself, or in an independent page.
• Give a concrete and not excessively long period for completing the survey.
• Your survey has to be attractive to fill out. Starting with the title, something like “Quick Survey. . .” followed by subjects that need to be clear and concrete.
• If you are not sure on how to cover all the possible answers for a matter, present a simple series of appreciations ranging from 1 to 5, for example.
• Pepper the questionnaire with a bit of sense of humor for an added refreshing effect.
• Don’t make your survey extremely long; focus on key aspects.
• At the end, include a question of global appreciation and a field where to gather any comments on things that may have not been covered by any of the presented issues.
• Include contact fields for those who polled, at least name, and the e-mail address.
• In some cases, it may be necessary to give the option of filling out the questionnaire anonymously.
• In the footer, include an e-mail address or a telephone number in case of doubts with regards to the questionnaire.
• If it is appropriate, announce that the statistical results will be published immediately among participants. This will encourage them to fill it out. Never publish the free comments—just statistics regarding the appreciations.
• If you think it is convenient, include in the footer a link to your company’s privacy policy.

How do you ask for feedback for your business? Got more feedback tips to share?

Photo Credit: Official GDC via Flickr.

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While many hosted web-based project management apps focus on collaboration, few of them are open source. And while there are quite a few open source project management apps, few focus heavily on collaboration in a way that’s designed for virtual teams.

Teambox has both of those covered.

Dashboard

When you first log in, the main focus is on all recent activity and comments made by other team members. Teambox allows you to ask questions, make comments, attach files, and delegate tasks all from the Dashboard — making it easy to see an overview of not only what’s happening but also everyone’s and every task’s status.

Task Management

Teambox’s Task Management page is very “social network-inspired” (think Facebook and Twitter). Teambox makes it easy to assign tasks to people, assign due dates and (of course) leave comments.

Charts, Reports, and Calendars

Teambox makes it easy to view what’s due when, along with who’s responsible for what in whatever form is easiest for you to visualize — either Gnatt charts, reports, or on a calendar. You can either view the calendar straight in Teambox, or sync it to your personal calendar or smartphone. In addition, you can log time tracking on the calendar.

Whiteboards

Whiteboards are great for collaborating with a team. You can post useful links, information you constantly need to reference back to, or start sketching out a formal document (such as a proposal). Teambox’s Whiteboards are incredibly intuitive — I rarely had to reference the formatting help section my first time using them.

Conversations

In addition to being able to comment on tasks and collaborate on Whiteboard, Teambox also allows you to have “Facebook-style” chats to brainstorm and discuss ideas that aren’t specifically task-related.

Email Intergration

Teambox allows you to both respond to comments through email, along with creating or updating the status of a task using project “short codes.” Very handy if you live in your email inbox.

Mobile

Mobile is a huge consideration when it comes to project management apps and Teambox has you covered. Simply go to the Teambox website using an iPhone, Android device, or Blackberry and you’ll see a mobile-optimized version.

Pricing

Teambox offers a free plan, but it’s pretty limited: 3 projects and 50 MB of storage. In addition, Teambox also offers a few additional features for companies with over 100 employees, such as unlimited projects and company branding starting at $3/user.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a complete, open source, project management solution with heavy collaboration features that can work for a single freelancer environment all the way up to a corporate setting, Teambox is definitely worth checking out.

For more on Teambox:

• Lifehacker: Teambox Is an Open Source, Social Network-Influenced Online Project Management App
• WebWorkerDaily: Teambox: Collaborate Freely with Your Team: Online Collaboration
• Web.Appstorm: Getting Things Done in the Workplace With Teambox

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Clutterpad operates on 5 principles:

1. Sheer Beauty
2. Ease and Simplicity
3. Define Productivity
4. Complete Mobility
5. Security

Sheer Beauty

Clutterpad believes that to want to use something, you have to like the way it looks — and I completely agree. Clutterpad manages to achieve this with a sleek look where all features are easily accessible, without the interface looking cluttered.

Ease and Simplicity

Clutterpad thinks that “software should be as intuitive and easy to use as switching on a light.” While I still recommend that you always read all the features (and a product’s blog) — Clutterpad does do a pretty good job of having an intuitive interface.

Productivity Redefined

While I wouldn’t go as far as Clutterpad does in referring to using it as fun — it does offer a slew of features that can significantly help small teams stay organized, on track, and in touch all in one place.

Mobility

As a web-based app, Clutterpad is available from anywhere. (However, I didn’t see any mention of a mobile-optimized version.)

Security

Security is always concern — especially with cloud based apps — and Clutterpad lets it be know that they are super-serious about security.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is clean looking and when your first log in, the focus is a log of all recent activity across the team. You can view projects individually or as a group. The top box is an “At-A-Glance” section that shows your outstanding tasks, upcoming events, and how much file storage is being used.

To-Dos

The most impressive thing is that to-do items are color-coded: Red for Overdue, Orange for Due Today, and Green for Due in the Future — allowing you to see at a glance what’s due when. You can create to-do items for yourself or assign them to a team mate. You have the option to upload and attach a file, comment, or re-arrange the order of tasks. As an added bonus, you can filter to-do items by teammate as well.

Contacts

Contacts is a pretty straightforward feature: it allows you to input all your business contacts into one central location and track conversations with them.

Chatrooms

Something you don’t see in many project management apps is an honest-to-God-Campfire-style-chatroom — but Clutterpad has one! There’s even a private chat option.

Calendar

Another fairly straightforward feature, the calendar allows you to create events, set reminders, and color-code the calendars for your convenience.

Files

The files section allows you to easily upload, share, and re-download all project-related files.

WritePad

Writepad is a convenient way to easily start and share documents. You can also track each document’s revision history.

Messages

Messages allows you to help cut back on email clutter and keep all your communications in one place by posting a message and letting others comment on it. It’s not an email replacement, but it can help cut back on all those short 3 sentence emails that tend to wind up in your inbox when you’re collaborating on a project.

If you’re looking for a user-friendly, all-inclusive project management app for your team, Clutterpad is a great way to go. There are few barriers to entry, and its feature set has pretty much everything you’d be looking for in this type of software solution.

For More on Clutterpad:

• Lifehacker: Clutterpad Project Manager Updates; Now with Time Saving To-Do Templates
• Lifehacker: Clutterpad Puts Group Calendars, Contacts, To-Do Lists, and More in a User-Friendly Interface

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ProjeLead touts itself as:

“…a simple open source tool that will make project managers focus more on their project than on their project management tool.”

Originally created to meet the internal needs of our project managers and consultants, ProjeLead has been offered as a free download since early 2009 under an Open Source license. The response from its user base has been quite positive and while we’re yet to give it a full review, they are gaining traction in what is a very crowded space.

While we’ve heard this from other software solutions in the marketplace, we’ve yet to really see a tiered open source solution. ProjeLead has two tiers: Standard and Enterprise. You can check out the features that each version has to offer below.

ProjeLead’s Standard version is a free download, and you can get started with it here.

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EasySign is an application that promises to make filling in and signing documents on an iPhone or iPad a cakewalk.

I’ve been using the service ever since we covered it…and it’s been incredibly convenient. If you haven’t given it a look yet, check out our overview of the app and give it a try.

WorkAwesome & EasySign Contest

WorkAwesome has just received 5 unlimited EasySign packages for giveaway! To win, leave a comment here or on the EasySignMobile Facebook wall on how you will use/have used digital signing technology (maybe even EasySign) in your life.

The 5 winners will be chosen from those who leave a comment before Tuesday April 5th at 5 pm PST. Good luck!

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Yes, it happens all the time.

Remember the last time you lost out on a deal because you were to send an email on Tuesday and you forgot? Or when you forgot to follow-up on that urgent request by one of your friends or family, and then later spent hours on the phone doing damage control?

NudgeMail is an email reminder service that aims to get rid of email follow-up woes. Now, there are certainly things like Gmail labels, filters and other tools to create your own email follow-up system. But not every one can set them up in the perfect way. A simple service like NudgeMail might be a better alternative.

What Exactly is NudgeMail?

The way NudgeMail works is that you forward any email you need to follow-up on later to a nudgemail.com email address. That’s about it. Yes, there’s really nothing else to do. NudgeMail will automatically send that email back to you at the right time.

As you see in the screenshot above, if you send or forward an email to tomorrow@nudgemail.com, the service will remind you about that email the very next day. The service can be used to set up self-reminders by sending a quick email with the task in the body of the email, or you could use it to forward existing emails that you need to follow-up with the sender (now the recipient) later on.

How it Works

Here are the steps that are involved in making sure that you get the maximum benefit out of this email reminder service.

1. Create a new reminder email. You can also choose to forward an email that’s already in your inbox or in your “sent” items.
2. Send that email to nudge@nudgemail.com and type in the day, date or time in the subject line. You can have “tomorrow” or “June 12″ or “3 hours” in the subject line and NudgeMail will send it back to you at that time.
3. Instead of sending it to the address mentioned in the above step, you could also choose to send it to “tomorrow@nudgemail.com” or “june12@nudgemail.com.” That way, you don’t need to alter the email subject.
4. That’s about it. There’s no need to sign up separately for the service. Just send an email and you can get started. You can use the email subject and body to type any message that you need to remember.

Does it Work With Every Email Service?

Yes, actually. Since what you are doing is just sending an email and not using an add-on or software, it works wherever email works.

NudgeMail Commands

There are a huge number of email commands that can be used with this service. For example, instead of sending an email to monday@nudgemail.com, you could send it to mon@nudgemail.com. You could also use nextmonday@nudgemail.com. There are a number of such commands for day, date and time.

If you need to set recurring email reminders, there are commands like hourly@nudgemail.com or daily@nudgemail.com.

There are also some really cool advanced commands. For example, if you want an email to be sent back to you in the next hour, just send it to snooze@nudgemail.com. If you want to see a list of all of your active nudgemails, email status@nudgemail.com and you’ll be able to see them.

A complete list of advanced commands is available on the official NudgeMail “How to” page. In addition, you can integrate NudgeMail with Google Calendar. You’ll find the settings for that on the aforementioned page.

Things to Keep in Mind

Here are some things to keep in mind before you decide to give NudgeMail a shot.

• Emails with attachments don’t work with this service. While you can forward an email that has an attachment, when it is sent back to you, it won’t have that attachment.
• The service is currently in beta and free to use. In future, they plan to launch paid plans. I’m assuming that they’ll continue to have a decent free plan for the users who joined during the beta period.
• You can easily turn it off by sending an email to unsubscribe@nudgemail.com.
• NudgeMail currently works only with emails that are in English. Support for other languages will arrive soon.
• Finally, since your emails are being sent to a different server, there are bound to be security and privacy concerns. They’ve got a security and privacy page, where they talk about the measures they take to make sure that no one else is able to access your emails except yourself. That said, it is always up to the user to trust them.

(I would trust them with most of my emails — except for the ones that are too personal or private. So, I just wouldn’t forward them to NudgeMail. Simple as that.)

Conclusion

Overall, it’s a nifty email reminder service and can come in handy for those who are finding it hard to deal with email overload. Give it a whirl and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Software like Microsoft Project can do the job, but then there are people like me who don’t like spending a small fortune on buying software. ApolloHQ (see earlier review) is a great option, but the limiting factor is the online access required. Without the cloud, ApolloHQ cannot take flight.

Another viable option is Collabtive, which is free and open source project management software. It has a very elegant and easy-to-use interface. The user (once logged in) can add projects, which she can then manage. Project management with Collabtive is easy. You can have as many users as you want. The users can also send messages to each other, that may (or may not) contain information on projects. The only disadvantage for some people may be that it does not provide the ability to create Gantt charts.

Collabtive needs PHP in order to work. I installed XAMPP in order to get PHP support (Note: You can also use other softwares like WAMP, etc.). The installation is simple. Just download Collabtive and extract the files into a folder. Place the folder in the XAMPP (or WAMP) directory. In the Collabtive folder, you will find a file named ‘install.php’. Open the file in your browser and fill in the details. Now open ‘index.php’ and you shall see this screen.

Once logged in, you’ll go to your Desktop. Here you can see your projects and a calendar. Simply add a project and enter a few basic details. You can then click the project name to go to the Project Dashboard. You find the Calendar and the Timetracker here. Through the Timetracker, you can specify how much time you took to complete/perform a specific task, and add comments specific to the task. Activity in the bottom of the screen shows any updates made to your work.

In a project, you can also enter Milestones, see Tasklists, send Messages and also upload files up to a maximum of 8 MB. You can also control which group of users see the files and which users are to be notified.

There are four icons in the top right of the screen. They are the backbone of the UI. You can toggle between Desktop, My Account, Settings and the Logout button. On the right pane, you can see how many users are using Collabtive at the moment, and the lifeline is the Search option, which comes to the rescue when there are a lot of things going on Collabtive.

Lets look at a few features in detail.

1. Tasks and Milestones

Tasks and Milestones are the basic building block of project management. You can add a task or a milestone by simply clicking on the date (in the calendar) in which it is to be assigned. You can maintain a Tasklist that can come in handy while categorizing tasks. Milestones measure what has to be achieved. Milestones make the progress of the project tangible.

2. Tasklists

The most important of all the features I’ve used is the Tasklist. Collabtive lets you create many essential tasks and assign them to users (depending on your choice) under a single Tasklist. The Tasklist also shows how many days are left to complete a certain task. A tick on the left means you are done with the task.

3. Messages

Users can send messages to other users and any recieved messages are also shown here. They can specify tags as well, which are associated with messages containing them. This can come in handy should you have a lot of messages and need to find ones relating to a particular project or task.

4. Timetracker

As I mentioned earlier, Timetracker tracks the time used to complete a task  Enter the name, the time it started and the time it ended, and comments regarding the task. Messages and Timetracker reports can also be exported as a PDF or RSS feed.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Collabtive is a project management software that is not only free, but is one you can use when you want to spend more time working on the project and less time on managing it. Give it a try if you’ve yet to find a project management solution that works for you, or you need one that doesn’t break your bank and still gets the job done.

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Minus (or Min.us) is a super simple online file sharing tool that boasts a clutter-free interface and lets you share photos, music, documents and videos in seconds. Let’s check out how to use this service, and what features it offers.

Getting Started

For this review, we’ll just focus on sharing photos in order to facilitate a better explanation. All other file types can be shared in a similar manner.

When you visit the site, you will see an image that’s self-explanatory. It asks you to simply drag and drop files.

(Note: You can also click on the “select” link to upload files if you want, but most people will drag and drop.) That is all you need to do to get started with uploading files. That’s how quick it is. No sign up needed, either.

You can sign up, of course, and signing up does have its benefits (which we’ll talk about a bit later), but if you are planning to share just a photo or a small file, it’s just a matter of drag and drop to get the process going.

Sharing

In the case of pictures, it automatically creates an album which helps users go through them one after the other in a smooth way. As it uploads a picture, you can just keep dragging and dropping more photos; it’ll upload them and add them to the album automatically.

You’ll see the upload admin options in a small box on the top left of the page. It will have options to add a title to the album, remove individual uploads, download the entire collection as a zip file, edit the URL of the album and share it via various social channels.

Below each of the individual uploads, you have more sharing options. As you can see in the screenshot below, there’s the gallery link, the image link, a forum code (for sharing it on forums) and HTML code to embed it on blogs and websites.

In a nutshell, there’s absolutely no dearth of sharing options. You can even quickly email or share via chat the file upload URL that’s generated. Take a look at this test album I created (http://min.us/mvfHfUz). You’ll notice that even as a visitor, you can share it easily with other people as well. There’s also the box on the top left that has an option to download all of them as a zip file. That means this feature isn’t just limited to the one who uploads the stuff — it’s available to all.

Desktop, Browser and Mobile Apps

Minus’s extras page talks about the desktop, browser and mobile apps they have to offer. Here’s what’s available:

• Minus desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux. It integrates with the taskbar in each of these operating systems. That means you could directly drag and drop files onto the taskbar for quicker uploading and sharing.
• Chrome web store app. Extensions for Firefox and other browsers are said to be coming soon.
• Android app available. Apps for other mobile operating systems are also said to be coming soon.

Below is a screenshot of how Minus integrates with the taskbar in Ubuntu Linux.

Other Info

• Minus is completely free to use at the moment.
• Individual file size limit is 10MB.
• Uses Amazon EC2 and S3 for hosting the files.
• Signing up with them helps you store galleries so that you could come back to them later to edit them.
• Files are stored indefinitely until you delete them.
• You can upload all file types but gallery viewing is available only for JPEG, GIF, PNG, APNG and BMP (basically, only images).

Conclusion

Overall, if file sharing — be it photos, documents or videos — is something you do often, then I think this is a service you should bookmark and use. It’s quick and easy, and could definitely save you loads of time in the long run.

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