Smartlife

Gantt charts are incredible, and that’s not a word you get to apply to charts often. Or ever, if you haven’t experienced that jaw-dropping moment when you save your entire project before even starting it. Hundreds of managers have sat down to start a Gantt chart, thinking it’ll just be something shiny to show off in their next PowerPoint, only to find that their plan requires either cloning or time-travel to complete. Because the Gantt chart isn’t just a timeline, it’s interdependencies made easy. A single document hasn’t prevented so…

Gantt charts are a seriously smart way to organize everything: not just your work projects, but everything from home redecoration to Christmas dinner. Invented around 1910 by Henry Gantt, their first major deployment was in the World War — so they know a bit about getting things done in stressful situations. They became so ridiculously useful that the American Society of Mechanical Engineers now awards the Henry Gantt medal for management and community service. A national agency dedicated entirely to completing projects named an award after it. How many other…

Product/Service Name

Central Desktop

Brief Description

Central Desktop is a web-based collaboration platform that businesses can use to manage teams, projects, and documents from anywhere at any time. Central Desktop includes a full suite of online collaboration tools including wikis, online documents, task management, shared calendars, discussion forums, databases, and micro-blogging. Easy to implement and scalable for mid-sized businesses, Central Desktop helps businesses communicate efficiently, increase productivity, and reduce costs.

Product/Service Name

5pm

Brief Description

5pm offers a flexible approach to project management, by creating a central online location for everything from task management to time tracking. While there are a variety of project management web applications available, 5pm offers custom plans so that you can find a perfect fit for your organization’s needs.

Target audience: Any organization with a project to manage — and anyone who wants to get everything done by 5 p.m.

Volume of business: Users have been managing projects with 5pm since November 2007.

These days, you won’t always have immediate access to everyone who works on a given project. Maybe some aspects are being handled by freelancers. Maybe members of your team work remotely. Maybe you just aren’t in the office today. No matter how your team is distributed, you need to be able to assign tasks, share files, and manage your projects from anywhere. These applications offer the ability to do so from any Internet connection.

1. Basecamp: Considered one of the most popular project management applications online, Basecamp offers a very

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