Vertabase is re-releasing the Vertabase Timer v3.0 for free.

With over 12,000 downloads, the Vertabase Timer is a popular desktop Timer to track time on tasks or clients. It includes rates for tasks, task notes, time spent reports, graphing and exports to CSV and XML.  It works on both MAC and Windows machines.

You can read the full feature list on the Vertabase Timer website.

The change was made due to continued demand for the product and changes in Adobe’s support for the AIR marketplace.

As always, you can email suggestions for future features of the Timer to timer@vertabase.com.

Vertabase and our team were recently recognized as Project Management Visionaries by the popular PaperCut Edge project management blog.

The article explains our vision  on project management and project management software.

Big thanks to Geoff for the recognition and kind words.

The Task Scratch Pad is a personal, simplified, online spreadsheet that allows you to easily create task lists, brainstorm on project plans or create project schedules. It is another new feature in the latest release of our project management software.

Here is a video about the Vertabase Task Scratch Pad.

You can drag and drop tasks, quickly add new ones and save task lists for re-use.

Import task lists into project schedules with the click of a button.

It is simple to use and extremely versatile. You can use it to create schedules from scratch or add new tasks to existing projects.

Keep as many scratch pads going as you’d like.

“Never has a simple list been so informative…”

The Enhanced Project List page in Vertabase 5.0 shows you all your projects along with overview data on the projects and their status.

Here is a video of the Enhanced Project List page.

You can search, filter and sort your projects by a variety of criteria. For example, you can create a quick portfolio view and sort by project priority.  Or, search for all projects being done for a particular client and sort by percent complete.

On the list, you can see overall project health, schedule health and budget health, as well as other meta information on the project like budget amounts and the departments involved.

You can launch a calendar view of the project, its tasks and who is responsible for those tasks.  Or, you can drill down deeper into the project’s schedule, documents, budget or issue and discussions.

It is an easy to use way of getting information on your projects.

We announced Vertabase 5.0 to our customers yesterday.

One of the new features in Vertabase 5.0 is a desktop widget for uploading documents into Vertabase projects without having to open a browser.

You can upload documents simply by Dragging and Dropping them onto the widget!

Here is a video of the Vertabase Document Uploader

You can upload multiple files and different file types like doc, psd, pdf, jpg and xlsx.

Vertabase 5.0 is the 10th major release of our project management software in 12 years, and the most significant release in the last 5 years.  We’ll be blogging about it more as the public release comes closer.

The Vertabase Document Uploader was written in Adobe AIR and works on MAC & Windows.

Vertabase released a case study today that documents the tremendous success Webbed Marketing, an online marketing firm, has had managing their workload during a phase of rapid growth using Vertabase project management software.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

The time we spent on tracking our own tasks and manually generating reporting can now be spent on direct, revenue generating work for our clients.

and

Everyone from the CEO to an intern can use Vertabase with very little training or explanation.

You can read other great quotes in the case study online or the PDF.

Last week I gave a presentation at the Internet User Experience conference on Social Networking, Permission Boundaries and User Adoption.  Based on the many requests for it, the presentation is now available online.

The presentation introduces a framework for deciding which social media components to include in your company or in any software you run.

Given the tremendous growth of Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks, many companies and organizations are rushing to add social media components to their software or marketing mix.  However, there is little in the way of how to decide on what to implement nor how to figure out if people will use it or interact with it.

The presentation takes a classic user adoption approach (the user’s cost/benefit calculation on whether some is a pain to do or not) and applies it Social Media components.

It introduces the concept of PERMISSION BOUNDARIES as a way of capturing the cost side of the equation.

It recommends identifying and describing specific SOCIAL TRANSACTIONS to capture the target benefit the user is going for.

This should provide a robust way to help make decisions on what will likely work or not, to think about whether people will interact with your company or not before you invest in the social media tools they could engage with.

A new case study was released describing how Creativity, Inc. of Van Nuys, California doubled the productivity of their internal art department using Vertabase project management software. The case study looks at performance over the last four years and concludes:

“I would strongly recommend Vertabase to coordinate project management activities for internal creative teams. There is absolutely no downside.”

Here are links to the case study, a pdf of the case study and the press release about it.

I read an interesting analysis comparing the permission settings of Facebook and MySpace and how the permissioning impacts

• the type of information people share and
• the adoption of the websites.

The article makes the point that people feel comfortable sharing meaningful information on Facebook because it has more controlled and tighter permissioning than MySpace. It also states that this is one of the secrets behind the increased adoption of Facebook.

Facebook, the article continues, has an “exclusive” feel, like a club or fraternity. You can decide your circle of friends and therefore who gets to see the information you post.  Because you can control the connections, you are comfortable sharing meaningful information. Because the information remains meaningful, you keep coming back to the website.

MySpace has the feel of almost any place on the web. It is less exclusive. Information posted on MySpace can be seen by a wider audience. This openness, the article points out, leads to people posting less meaningful information, fewer discussions and, ultimately, less participation by each person.

ROLES IN A PROJECT

People’s roles in a project are defined. They may be defined by the project plan, by a person’s skillset, an organizational chart or the formal relationship among the project team.  The connections are not made in public, as it were.  There is a relationship in place.

Good project management software (like Vertabase) can map these roles into specific access levels and leverage those roles to improve projects.

Like with Facebook, you can increase the value of the information shared on projects by

• defining the type of information people can share
• controlling who gets to see that information and
• defining how that information is shared.

This will drive adoption of the project management software as a whole, and keep ongoing participation in projects high.

Wanted to pass on some great feedback from a new Vertabase customer and their first-hand experience using the timesheets on the iPhone.

Feedback has been positive so far with regards to how simple and easy the system is to use. I even tested timesheet entry using Safari and our iPhones and it works great. I looked at many web-only timesheet/project management products and Vertabase has exceeded my expectations so far.

The company is a strategic marketing and research firm.