Vertabase is proud to have been honored by the Michigan Council of Women and Technology at their annual Partnership Recognition and Scholarship Award event.

This great organization encourages the advancement of women in technology related fields through mentoring, Summer tech camps for girls, laptop awards and, to-date, 0ver $300,000 in direct scholarships to a remarkable group of people (through the MCWT Foundation). Keep up the great work!

Question: How can government be made more efficient with project management software or by using project management in public administration?

Answer: Project management software provides a clear structure in which all steps of a public works project can be spelled out.

A basic break-down of the steps in a project can provide an effective operational overview of municipal or Federal government projects. This gives executives or public sector employees a clear way to track progress, identify bottlenecks and learn from past projects -because the tasks involved and people or departments associated with those tasks are clearly identified. This level of visibility in public administration can breed increased efficiency and transparency in the use of government resources.

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Export Reports.com added a new feature this week. ExportReports.com will now embed any images in your Basecamp project in the exported pdf. Supported formats include: bmp, gif, jfif, jpeg, jpg, png, pnm, raw, tif, tiff, wbmp

I’d been meaning to write a review of the XO Laptop for the last couple of months.

This recent article in the Wall Street Journal finally prompted me to put this response together.

I purchased one through the special promotion and our kids love it. And continue to love it. It has proven to be a staple when they are bored at home or when we travel -particularly to places without connectivity.

The main functions they use are exactly the creative programs that come pre-loaded.

They are more intuitive than the off-the-shelf equivalents and still offer a tremendous range of creativity -particularly Tom Tom and eToys.

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Happy to announce the beta launch of ExportReports.com!
It creates PDF reports of your Basecamp projects.

ExportReports.com is a collaborative effort with ColdFusion guru Terrence Ryan.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

On the technical side, Export Reports.com is written in Adobe ColdFusion 8 ’cause it works so well with PDF’s (-and we’re big fans anyway).

The popular Vertabase Timer now runs on AIR 1.0.

Visit the Timer download site to get this handy widget to track time on clients or on projects. It runs on both MAC and Windows (because its AIR). 

The current version is 0.9 and we’re still collecting feedback via the forum on what you’d like to see in the widget.

Adobe officially launched AIR 1.0 today. Congratulations!

 As an early adopter of the technology with our Timer product we are excited to see the technology reach prime-time.

Thank you to all the great people in California who welcomed me to their companies this week. It was a real pleasure.  From San Diego to Sacramento I visited Vertabase users across this vast and exciting state. 

We appreciate your business and I look forward to seeing everyone again.

Question: What are alternatives for issue tracking or to track issues on projects?

Answer: Vertabase project management software is a great alternative to commonly used collaboration tools or as an alternative to MS Project and other online project management tools.

The keys to good issue tracking are accountability, communication, and visibility.  Vertabase offers several advantages in these areas for web-based tracking.

• Time and date stamp of every post;
• Records the name of the person who made the poster;
• Automatic email notification of posts and replies and;
• Creates a searchable  knowledgebase of issues or posts.

The knowledgebase is searchable by project, issue status, post date and other criteria. This facilitates visibility and is great for increasing accountability. 

You can easily see the status of all issue posts across projects as well as track down who should be doing what.

Another factor that makes issue tracking practical for organizations with different people working on different projects for multiple clients is the ability very specifically define who can see an issue, who can start and issue and who is able to change the status of an issue. This can help prevent people from “closing” something that hasn’t truly been resolved yet.

You can see a screenshot of the online issue tracking system or sign-up for a free trial of the project software.

Vertabase project management software is now being taught in an MBA course on project management at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management in Illinois.

The software is used in the course: “Successful Projects: Define, Plan and Manager Your Work.”

Vertabase is discussed when the course goes over setting up Microsoft Project and using Vertabase as a compliment and comparison to MS Project.

It is further covered when the future MBA’s learn about controlling and managing multiple projects -using Vertabase. Since it is rare that an organization, and therefore a manager, will only have one project going on at a time.

Thank you to the course instructor for selecting Vertabase as the online project management software for this class.