Project and Document Collaboration Made Easy

Today let us discuss collaboration. Any time you have a project with more than one person involved, you have started a team. For any team to be productive, it must collaborate. Depending on the type of project you have, and the environment you are working in, this means many different things to different people.

Today let us discuss collaboration. Any time you have a project with more than one person involved, you have started a team. For any team to be productive, it must collaborate. Depending on the type of project you have, and the environment you are working in, this means many different things to different people.

If we are honest about it, the art of project management and team collaboration is a murky area, a bit of a black art except to those directly involved. At least, it can be to me. I thought we might use one of my simpler projects and see if we cannot shed a little clarity on the subject.

There are many types of projects as I have said. One of the best known may have been the original Mozilla Firefox project where you had developers from around the world working on a single application. The end result was the phenomenon we now almost take for granted - the Firefox browser.

But this was an extraordinarily large and complex project. Many of the tools I have used or played with over the years are built to handle exactly these gargantuan undertakings. While many are capable of much smaller and simpler projects, the reality is that they often almost make it feel too complex to use any type of management or collaborative tools.

This is a shame, and does not need to be the case.

The absolute simplest form of collaboration comes in the form of document collaboration - in the computer world that is. If your project is building a back deck than you likely have very different needs and I do not know if I can help there.

At any given point I may have between five, and twenty-five projects going. They range in scope from the simple like editing or cleaning up photographs for my brother's girlfriend, to the much more complex involving building entire web sites, product catalog, shopping carts, multimedia CDs, and traditional media like fliers, logos, brochures, etcetera.

Most projects are much simpler than that last example, and as soon as more than one person is involved, they all benefit from some form of project collaboration and management tool. In the modern world the people involved in a project are often 100s or even 1000s of miles apart. This only furthers the need for some kind of tool to share files and information - and keep it all straight.

Has Joe made his changes yet? Which version is he working on? Where is my copy of the file Suzy was updating yesterday?

...as I said, it often gets horribly complicated. All you want is to edit that sales pitch to the investor before Tom goes to give his spiel, after the lawyer Larry reviews it one more time.

Most of us rely on email to send instructions and updated files to the next collaborator, then have to wait until it comes back around to be our turn. Or on certain projects each person works on their copy and at the end some mighty hand merges everything together into a cohesive bundle.

For a number of reasons, none of these approaches is overly efficient. Nor do they offer an easy way in which to manage versions of documents. Imagine that half-way through your project the primary thrust changes. These changes become reflected in the documents you and your partners are trading back and forth, and then, at the last minute something changes and you GOTTA have something that was in the second, of what is now the eighth version - and you need it by delivery time tomorrow; 8:30 AM ...it is now 11:30 PM.

Unless you personally made copies of everything, of every version as it passed through your hands, you have nine hours to get a hold of a partner who may or may not have an old copy kicking around - or you had better get typing!

Can you tell I have been there before? If you have, you know exactly what I am talking about. If you are now, I feel your pain.

What you need is a secure, and centralized, location you can all access, stores files, maintains version numbers and who last edited the files automatically, and is easy as pie to use. If you have gobs of money to pay for the server - hard and soft - you can use something like Microsoft Groove and Microsoft Sharepoint.

We do not all have that luxury, nor are these tools always as simple as I would like.

You could use one of a number of online services such as Google Docs or Zoho Office. There is a slew of web-based tools which allow you to share and access files through a browser, but unless you look at spending money, they all have limits on file space and the types of files you can upload, often are teasers to get you to spend money, and usually must be accessed through a web browser.

I still want something much simpler. I do not want to have to "Leave my PC", and I want total control over who accesses the files. There is an amazing answer to these wishes of mine. Not only are they not unrealistic, they are totally feasible and can be set up in about five minutes flat.

The Answer? TeamDrive,

Let us take that simple project of mine and I will show you how, in about ten minutes you can avoid all the various document collaboration issues I mentioned earlier - ever again.

I write these articles, like this very one you are reading right now. I publish them in a couple of different places. Before they are published I like to have them vetted by peers I trust for accuracy, as well as editing for grammar and so on. I also may make various copies available to one publisher versus another. I have a repository where people can pick the articles they wish to publish, etcetera.

I use a very small program / service called TeamDrive which runs in the background on my computer to do all of this. When I create, or edit, a file it is saved on my local file system, and automatically updated on a remote server where only the people I have invited via email can access these files.

If I move a file out of the shared folders, nobody can access it anymore (unless they have saved a local copy). The same holds true if I delete a file. I can set up shared folders where only publishers can access the documents in one folder, editors in another, and myself music from yet a third.

Before we go any further, I am not affiliated in any way, nor will I receive any type of compensation from TeamDrive. I am simply very satisfied with their ability to provide a Microsoft Groove or Microsoft Sharepoint type of service. Only I think that for basic projects such as this example it is a much more simple to use system, and the price if right - free.

So here is what you do if you want to test the service yourself. First, head over to their site; http://www.teamdrive.net ; and download the installer. You can find a copy for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. I have not used it, but there is also a version for USB thumb-drives that I have not yet played with. The windows installer took me about two minutes to download over a 5mb/5mb connection.

Once downloaded, run the installer. It will ask all the normal questions you are asked during an installation, then once complete, if you would like to start TeamDrive. Go ahead and say yes please. The install takes a few seconds, but you do not need to do much except push next two or three times after accepting the license agreement.

Once the software starts up for the first time you are presented with a screen that asks if you want to create a new account, or use an existing one. For our purposes we are going to set up a new account. Choose the "Creating a new TeamDrive Account" and click next.

On the next screen we are asked to create a user name and a password, provide an email address, and to verily our realness through Captcha security. The Email will be used to validate your existence. There is a check box asking whether or not to display your email address in the TeamDrive interface. This is only accessed by members of your team, with access to your shares, so presumably they already have your email address. Either way, it is your call here.

Once you complete this short sign up form, the system verifies that the software is running, that you are connected to the Internet, and that your desired user name is available. If it is not, enter another choice and click "Verify Again". Once you pass all the tests click the next button.

At this point you see a screen telling you that en email has been sent to you to verify your address. Check your inbox and click the link in the mail they send - it comes very quickly - then push next. Almost done, the software asks once more if you would like to start TeamDrive now, and if you want to view the read me file. Click Finish and the software loads.

At this point you now have a new folder in My Documents named TeamDrive Shares which is basically an extension to a remote hard drive worth 100 megabytes of space that you can use for all sorts of file collaboration purposes, as a backup for personal files, or even if project management and document collaboration is not your thing, a way to share your files between your personal laptop and your PC.

Even this type of system can seem reasonably complex enough that many folks quit right here - but the hardest part is now over. Your next step is to create shares within the TeamDrive folder, populate them with files, and send invites to other collaborators.

You now have a remote file collaboration and storage system worthy of a major enterprise, with none of the cost! Tomorrow we will discuss how to actually use this system to its full potential.