Not that long ago I published a post called TeamLab vs Basecamp: A Project Management Duel where I looked through the pros and cons of the two project management systems. We all seem to know where Basecamp is heading, but today I’d like to give you a small update about TeamLab.
Just a quick note — TeamLab is a project and business management system developed by a company called Ascensio System SIA based in Latvia. They seem to be growing and definitely working hard on their product which is available in two flavors, self-hosted via the open source version, available on SourceForge and a SaaS solution hosted in the Amazon cloud.
The recent changes to TeamLab included new project templates, a real-time chatting module, some cool additions to the tasks area, and of course their brand new documents module with a neat integration with OpenOffice via a plugin. It doesn’t seem like they’re after the Google Docs market, but managing your documents inside your corporate portal without having to use third-party online and offline applications with files going back and forth is definitely a plus, although I’d personally prefer a full integration with Google Docs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0vE8RXd9M0
Quite user-friendly to me, though I can’t remember the last time I had to work with word documents or spreadsheets, heh, it’s all about code these days ;)
Now that they’re done with their Docs part, it seems like they’re after the CRM module, let’s see what they make of that. I had a bad experience working with 37signals’ Highrise API, though the application itself works like a charm. And the reason I thought about the API first rather than the web interface itself, is because I believe that the API is essential to any, especially web-based CRM system out there. I had my good days with SugarCRM, their SOAP API is crap, but it works, done a major website integration there ;) Watch out Salesforce!
Oh and for their next modules poll I voted for SCM integration. I’d really love to see a full-blown Git, Mercurial or Subversion integration. It seems like TeamLab didn’t have this in mind at all, while Basecamp have a big list of such extras already: Basecamp Extras: Software Development.
Cheers and have fun managing your projects!
