Planzone – Where Teamwork Begins

by Henry Baum on Feb 6, 2009 - 1 Comment
Planzone – Where Teamwork Begins
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Within a fairly crowded market of online project management applications, Planzone offers a similar product but with solid performance – especially for those of us who didn’t get a degree in project management.

Though Planzone uses lofty words to describe its intentions – “A set of intuitive tools, designed for optimizing collaboration on projects involving both internal and external resources” – the site is actually quite simple to use. It helps team members organize a project by setting to-do lists, schedules, document sharing, and other team-oriented features. To this end, the site is not nearly as useful for a single-person business but can be used to set personal to-do lists and goals.

Most impressive in Planzone’s set of tools is the interactive planning tool which develops those normally complex, but useful Gantt-style charts with relative ease. To get you rolling quickly, Planzone also offers a host of starter project templates.

Practical Uses:

  • Keep your clients appraised of their project’s progress and facilitate client input using Planzone
  • Manage the myiad of tasks and people involved in your event planning business
  • Engage your employees in your company’s growth plans by creating a project portal accessible by everyone

Insider Tips:

  • Set email alerts so team members will be alerted when their late on a project – or a deadline is approaching
  • Configure to do lists to be published via RSS, so you can access updated items in applications like Google Reader
  • Transfer files from Google Groups to Planzone
  • Create “virtual members” who you can keep tabs on, but who don’t necessarily need full access to the Planzone site

What we liked:

  • Free for a limited number of projects, so anyone can take the site out for a spin
  • User-friendly interface for each component
  • Helpful project startup tools like the template library
  • Available in a number of different languages

What we didn’t like:

  • Skimpy on the storage space for free accounts
  • Prices in Euros make the listed prices more expensive than on first impression
  • Doesn’t have the greatest color-coding to delineate project importance – or ideas within that project

Alternatives:

Company Info:

Costs:

  • Free to 49.90 Euros/month

One Comment

  1. Fred Goldberg says: May 13, 2009 • 12:28:35

    Planzone is a great tool indeed, but these alternatives are worth the try as well:

    Autotask – http://www.autotask.com
    AceProject – http://www.aceproject.com
    Daptiv – http://www.daptiv.com

    Reply

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