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Doesn’t seem possible, does it? How can four very different applications work together?

With one unique application.

TeamDirection Project 2007 has the robustness of an athlete, the wherewithal of a concierge and the communication skills of a diplomat. But perhaps most importantly it brings project management to a more human level.

We realize there are people involved in projects. This is why we integrated Instant Messaging right into the project view. We made it behave very similarly to SharePoint integration with MS Office apps so SharePoint (and Groove) users will be right at home.

But the real benefits are for team members who don’t need a project management tool. Rather, they just need their browsers to point to SharePoint workspaces. Or if they have the newest MS Office family member, Groove 2007, then join Groove workspaces that take advantage of forms. The important thing is these team members need no additional software to participate in the project and complete their tasks.

We also aim to make the project manager’s life a little better too. It’s now very easy to move data from MS Project into TeamDirection, and from TeamDirection back to MS Project. Not import/export, but full synchronization. And not necessarily the entire project.

For example, while a project manager may be perfectly at home in a 1000 task project, sometimes its easier for a team to work on smaller pieces. TeamDirection Project lets the project manager identify a summary task as the piece of the project to share. Once in the TeamDirection system, we maintain a link to the summary task’s origin and allow it to be published to either SharePoint Task Lists or Groove Task Lists. TeamDirection Project will then gather task data as people update their assigned tasks and synchronize that data with original summary task (and its children) in MS Project. It may sound difficult, but we’ve got it down to two clicks.

The result is any summary task can become a shared task list.

And not just MS Project summary tasks, but also topics and subtopics. The observant readers may have recognized the simple diagram above as a MindMap. We’ve found MindJet’s MindManager is not only a great way to conceptualize a project but a powerful way to communicate it to a broad audience. TeamDirection Project takes it one step further– it gives you a simple way to connect projects and tasks to individual team members, through SharePoint and Groove, so you can now execute and track them too.

Finally, we’ve made a few project management enhancements we’re proud of. Things like an improved, interactive Gantt chart and a better Task grid. Useful features like multi-level undo, multi-project views with filtering, a very handy project organizer to group projects and ’smart folders’ to quickly identify late ones.

Our philosophy at TeamDirection is ‘The Right Tool for the Job.’ We could spend years trying to make a project management solution do everything anybody ever wanted. But then it would end up looking something like this.

We believe in the right tool for the job. One of our jobs is making project management easy, accessible and useful. But our other job is to make sure the task data you need is in the application you want. MS Project, MindJet, SharePoint and Groove are a few such applications, but there are many more out there. Most of the world’s projects are started with Excel. More and more task lists are executed with next generation web applications like BaseCamp and @Task. TeamDirection helps you make sure your projects are completed with the right tool for the right audience.

Doesn’t seem possible, does it? How can four very different applications work together?

With one unique application.

TeamDirection Project 2007 has the robustness of an athlete, the wherewithal of a concierge and the communication skills of a diplomat. But perhaps most importantly it brings project management to a more human level.

We realize there are people involved in projects. This is why we integrated Instant Messaging right into the project view. We made it behave very similarly to SharePoint integration with MS Office apps so SharePoint (and Groove) users will be right at home.

But the real benefits are for team members who don’t need a project management tool. Rather, they just need their browsers to point to SharePoint workspaces. Or if they have the newest MS Office family member, Groove 2007, then join Groove workspaces that take advantage of forms. The important thing is these team members need no additional software to participate in the project and complete their tasks.

We also aim to make the project manager’s life a little better too. It’s now very easy to move data from MS Project into TeamDirection, and from TeamDirection back to MS Project. Not import/export, but full synchronization. And not necessarily the entire project.

For example, while a project manager may be perfectly at home in a 1000 task project, sometimes its easier for a team to work on smaller pieces. TeamDirection Project lets the project manager identify a summary task as the piece of the project to share. Once in the TeamDirection system, we maintain a link to the summary task’s origin and allow it to be published to either SharePoint Task Lists or Groove Task Lists. TeamDirection Project will then gather task data as people update their assigned tasks and synchronize that data with original summary task (and its children) in MS Project. It may sound difficult, but we’ve got it down to two clicks.

The result is any summary task can become a shared task list.

And not just MS Project summary tasks, but also topics and subtopics. The observant readers may have recognized the simple diagram above as a MindMap. We’ve found MindJet’s MindManager is not only a great way to conceptualize a project but a powerful way to communicate it to a broad audience. TeamDirection Project takes it one step further– it gives you a simple way to connect projects and tasks to individual team members, through SharePoint and Groove, so you can now execute and track them too.

Finally, we’ve made a few project management enhancements we’re proud of. Things like an improved, interactive Gantt chart and a better Task grid. Useful features like multi-level undo, multi-project views with filtering, a very handy project organizer to group projects and ’smart folders’ to quickly identify late ones.

Our philosophy at TeamDirection is ‘The Right Tool for the Job.’ We could spend years trying to make a project management solution do everything anybody ever wanted. But then it would end up looking something like this.

We believe in the right tool for the job. One of our jobs is making project management easy, accessible and useful. But our other job is to make sure the task data you need is in the application you want. MS Project, MindJet, SharePoint and Groove are a few such applications, but there are many more out there. Most of the world’s projects are started with Excel. More and more task lists are executed with next generation web applications like BaseCamp and @Task. TeamDirection helps you make sure your projects are completed with the right tool for the right audience.

leaving for mexico in few hours, halloween was fun…on that note:
metadata:halloween nightlife party people photo seattlehalloween, nightlife, party, people, photo, seattle

I caught a link to Blue Dot via Scoble tonight. I took a look at their online demo and it looks like they’ve done some of the things I planned to do with Avinoo, just not with all the emphasis on web feeds.

To return readers, I apologize if my tendency to point out the “Avinoo idea” has gotten annoying. This may be the last time you’ll hear about it. I’ve gotten past the point of being frustrated about a good idea getting overshadowed, and now I’m actually happy to see that sites like Facebook and Blue Dot are bringing it to the masses. Afterall, if I didn’t think it was a cool idea that I would put to use myself on a daily basis, I wouldn’t have spent the time I did trying to unleash Avinoo on the world.

I had a reader write in tonight asking me if I could help shed some light on why Americans pronounce the last letter of the alphabet, Z, as “zee” while Canadians pronounce it as “zed.” Well, I had no clue they even did this, but a quick Google search helped me uncover some interesting facts on the matter (if you can call information you find online facts these days). First off, The Canada Page reveals some Canadian myths, one of which involves the idea that Canadians speak Canadian:

The two official languages are English and French. Many Canadians can speak both and other languages. However aside from a few pronunciations (ie: Americans say “Z” as “zee” and Canadians say it as “Zed”), and spelling (Americans “color”, Canadians “colour”) the English between the two countries are identical.

Okay, so at first glance it appears that French is to blame. Believe it or not, that was my first guess before I ever asked Google for help. But, a little further investigation reveals that “zed” may actually go beyond just the French language. At a page titled simply “zee and zed,” I found the following:

‘Z’ is called “zed” everywhere in the world, not only in English but also in French, German, and most other languages, except in the United States, where it is called “zee”. Hence “zee” is an American shibboleth.

I’ll leave figuring out what shibboleth means as an exercise for the reader.