They’ve been in closed beta for a while and reading the blog – most of their recruits have come via Twitter, as opposed to Google – things are changing out there (but that’s another story).

Producteev is slick looking web 2.0 app which has a fully drag and dropable interface to enable you to collaborate with colleagues. You use the interface to create tasks for yourself which can then be delegated or assigned to team members and those members leave comments to update you on these tasks over time.

Supporting the task management are the features you come to expect in today’s online application age – reminders, a calendar app and importantly integration into the mobile world (Iphone, Windows Mobile & Nokia) so that you can follow what’s going on wherever you are.

The interface centres around your dashboard where you can create new ‘boxes’ and then set their sharing settings to keep personal or sensitive projects separate from collaborative ones.

Team members are added by simply adding their email address or using the handy importer which caters for the usual suspects, including Outlook. There is a ‘Friendfeed style’ live feed tab which shows you comments and activities as they happen – although do we have room for another Twitter in our lives? I have to say I would argue yes – as this is a closed user group of business knowledge flowing to you as opposed to well… a Twitter stream – which is quite different.

Project files can also now be shared across firewalls in this closed user group environment using the files tab and the upload area.

The Producteev guys have really thought about the integration aspects and have ensured the application’s feeds can be seen in all of your day to day information screens – such as GTalk, Twitter, SMS, Email and ICQ, meaning you can get the most out of the application without having to monitor it separately all day.

We would say that with the experience of Ilan Abehassera, Founder and CEO and the backing of some prominent business angels that the service has hit that niche of remote and collaborative working very nicely. With more and more people going it alone – freelancing and working in virtual teams – cross-firewall applications are going to become critical to making this new reshaped economy function. Employee productivity is not going away – in fact if anything, if you work for yourself, you’re going to focus even more heavily on it into the future as you look to get more done, faster.

Best of luck with their launch. Once you’ve checked them out, come back and take a look at this link if you are looking to be innovative in finding other ways of increasing your team’s employee productivity. With a free trial you have nothing to lose…

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

We know that many corporate firewalls have been blocking those  non-productive URLs for many years. Many small businesses however will not have taken things so far – either because of their technical inability or because there is more trust in employees.

You may however like to try a voluntary experiment at some point in the future and ask you team to each download a small program called URL Blocker from the good folks at Computer Help. It is a seriously simple piece of software which you simply add all the sites you believe are hampering employee  productivity during your working hours… those sites you just have to keep checking on an hourly basis to see if anything’s changed… you know which ones.

You can remove the block at a certain time or after a specific number of hours and the program can be password protected. If you ask a colleague to set the password – there can be no weak moments when you switch it off – just for 30 minutes….

Why not set up a trial today in your office – get your team bought into the idea and see what happens… you never know, they may even thank you…!

Timecamp claims that for businesses they can ‘reduce employee misbehaviour and increase productivity‘… for individuals you can ‘understand how you spend your time and get more done’. Interestingly, they offer another dimension for parents – where you can use Timecamp for free as ‘parental control software’, which is a nice twist.

Like many of these solutions, Timecamp offers a small download where time tracking is transparent. The software sits as a background process and silently monitors the applications and websites you use during your day. The software then sends data back to their hosted servers and you can then log in periodically to see what you’ve been up to…

You can set productivity goals and see how you compare over weeks or months and see trends appearing over time.

Firstly by viewing the data in its rawest form…

Timecamp in action

And then in a more advanced, graphical view. Trends over time can prove invaluable in working out where your employee productivity goes out the window…

Timecamp graphical reports

The software is stable and provides you with much food for thought at the end of the day or week.

If you then combine the power of the individual solution with a workgroup and track you and your colleagues together (for a small monthly fee) then you can really start to make some progress.

For the business service they link into Zoho to make an attempt at an ROI calculator (although I’d say it’s a fairly basic attempt) however it’s a nice touch.

Pricewise, it’s a minimal monthly fee per seat and is on a par with the services mentioned above – so it really does come down to personal opinions when evaluating. To get you on your way – you can sign up for a free business trial for 30 days right here.

Step forward Remindo – a web 2.0 ‘Office bringer-together’ – our words not theirs… It’s in alpha at the moment – but it works – because we’ve been testing it. It’s not going to break the bank either – because it’s free…!

Remindo is a collaborative web tool which as they mention on their site a number of times is designed to increase your employee productivity because team members are more easily connected together.

By signing up colleagues, you suddenly have your very own collaborative workspace with a private Twitter equivalent, shared news feeds, shared contacts, shared files, shared project plans an internal email system and shared to-do lists.

It’s perfect for small user-groups who’ve felt disjointed by the geographic or physical boundaries of working remotely. The software effectively brings your office together – even when it’s not together (if you know what we mean).

We mentioned it’s in ‘Alpha’ – which may sound a little scary to the uninitiated – however the service does work. For us,  improvements in some of the layout and design elements will be the difference between alpha and beta – the stability however is not in question.

The team, led by Rehan yar Khan, an experienced Indian entrepreneur will no doubt be adding new functionality over the coming months and we suspect will turn Remindo into a real winner, because it is addressing a real problem area for small and medium businesses looking to collaborate with a distributed workforce.

Reduce time spent trying to collaborate and boost your employee productivity today with Remindo.

Related articles

• Driving Change: Selling SharePoint and Social Media Inside the Enterprise (readwriteweb.com)
• DocVerse: Microsoft Office Sharing and Collaboration (+Invites) (readwriteweb.com)
• Microsoft to upgrade SharePoint when Office 14 ships (infoworld.com)

Maybe it’s never occurred to you. Today – have a serious think the next time you perform a task – consider if it’s something you do on a regular basis and whether it could be automated in some way.

One of the best tools on the market we’ve found (and we’ve looked at a few now) is a suite of software which caters for complete novices, right the way through to enterprise grade automation. It works on the principle of recording your keystrokes and builds macros to automate those tasks.

So, let me give you an example – say every morning you turn on your PC, open up several pages online, check your email, update your intranet with today’s customer visits and fire up your sales database… wouldn’t it be cool if that could all be going on while you fixed yourself a cup of coffee and perhaps watched a video lesson from The 8.45 Club?

Well – you can. The guys at Tethyssolutions have released an excellent software suite to help you to automate processes as I’ve just described. It all works by recording your mouse movements and key strokes and then once you have a sequence recorded, hitting one button will perform that whole series of tasks.

Maybe you need to copy and paste a large amount of data from one application to another – but it needs to be done row by row and there are 1,000 rows? It’s going to take you all day normally? Simply record one copy and paste sequence, followed by the action of clicking down a row, and then repeat multiple times. Hours saved, meaning you can be doing something useful and keeping your employee productivity at an all time high. It’s like you will have two pairs of hands…

So where can you get the software?

Option 1 is the basic package

Option 2 is for more advanced users and gives you more functionality

Option 3 is their high end solution

Their are free trial downloads for each – so you’ve got nothing to lose by seeing how much time it can save you.

Good luck!

As you can see from that list, there are many different ways of measuring employee productivity and it’s easy to get a bit carried away with technology and then getting really anal about making people enter time against tasks and so on.

We’ve said it before – the software is the easy part. The tricky part is the cultural acceptance of any new system which you are looking to introduce and there are some techniques of how best to do this at the monitoring productivity blog.

Timesheet software isn’t always the be all and end all when it comes to time tracking… Spreadsheets – especially inside Google Docs so that they are easily shared are another way… accounting applications like Quickbooks often have tracking applications within them which integrate into the accounts.

You can also use applications like Fruitfultime or Rescuetime (and can read the reviews at those links) to effectively spy on yourself to see what you’ve been up to during the day and combine results with colleagues.

Our final piece of advice is to only measure and report on the things you are really interested in and can make a real difference to your business if you focus on them by analysing collated results. If employees see you acting on gathered results, they’ll be more likely to participate accurately.

UPDATE:

You may also be interested to see a review of Timecamp right here.

Related articles

• Collaborative Spreadsheet Art (freeware-shareware.suite101.com)
• TimeXchange: Simple web-based timesheet management (downloadsquad.com)
• Smartsheet Teams Up With Amazon (xconomy.com)

FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter Personal Edition automatically tracks your PC activity (for Windows users only) so that you can get a clearer picture over time of how time is spent. In theory you can then adjust your activities accordingly.

The software sits in the background while you work and keeps a watchful eye over the applications you are using  – including the split between active time and idle time and which sites you’ve been browsing. It will then provide a graphical representation of how you spend your time.

Pretty graphs are all well and good – but of course there’s no point in having this type of technology and then not doing anything with the information to boost employee productivity. Reports can be viewed for the last day, the last week or month or a user-defined block of time and if you define and add tags to your various applications and lists of websites, reporting gets even more granular

One of the big differences between Fruitfultime and other similar systems is that information is stored on your hard drive, as opposed to online, ensuring that data is always accessible and secure.

Finally, there is also timesheet functionality available – more and more we are going to become more accountable for our time and if your business doesn’t have a timesheet solution now – it won’t be long before you are looking for one.

Please note this program is free for personal use and they are launching a business version in Q1 of 2009.

Download it here and start to be more fruitful straight away!