This section is on a teamwork of kind of a difference. Or the first one I was talking about somewhat more conventional and probably useful for internal work work with clients, I want to talk more about web based collaboration tools, a couple of them in particular, because I think they have a lot to offer, both just for workings within the company, and for working externally, with clients, partners, or whatever. But one myth I want to talk about first, hopefully, I don't need to explain it, and you can skip past this section. But I see it time and again, in fact, the bigger the company, the more I see this and it just drives me absolutely bonkers. Email is a rotten collaboration tool. It's structurally bad for getting things done with many people.

And let me explain briefly why, hopefully, to talk you out of using email for collaboration because it'll just kill you. It'll suck up time like nobody's business. Here's you sending an email with a document to two friends, okay? They get the email. He's got a copy, and he's got a copy. And if they modify it and we move forward in time, here's you again.

Move forward time and they send it back. What do we have? We had they had copies of email with document version a, you now get two copies and you've got version P. And you've got version C, who has to make sense of those two things. You who has three copies of the message now at least three you you have copy a that you sent originally, probably in your sent mail as well. Copy, copy. See, when you reconcile them.

Glory ASCII, you're gonna make copy, day. And it goes on and on and on. And I know documents aren't the only way to collaborate, but words are words and images in the form of presentations are utterly the common toolkit for this, and I see I've got we've got clients in major, major corporations, and they email Word docs and email spreadsheets, and then they resolve them and they email them again, when if you run this scenario out and you send copy D of the email and the document to 15 people do the math, right, times 14 times 13 times 12, the number of permutations just gets abysmal after a while, your inbox gets longer and longer. And then the silliest thing of all, I don't know why we haven't fixed this in a while and someone saw someone in software's and fixed it. You read an email message backwards, right.

As it progresses, the previous answers gets shoved to the bottom. So you've got to do this. Read it in reverse chunks. Let me get down to the bottom as to what I said at the beginning and then see what they said back and then see what they said. You're going up the page down the page simultaneously, it's just, it's just not a good way to get many kinds of work done. The other thing about email is this pet peeve of mine.

It's point to point person to person and private. If a new guy comes into this mix, he doesn't know that a message was even sent from you to the first two people. He doesn't have access to it, and he doesn't have access to the responses and he doesn't have access to the additional versions of the documents. And yes, you could dump this whole mess on his head and say, figure it out. Not a good use of his time. But the really salient point is if this is someone in your companies, I need to tell everybody about x and you forget to forget to put him on the email.

He doesn't know about x. And that fundamental structural thing makes it just really ill suited to the purpose it's frequently put to. There are companies that have banned email for internal communication I love it. There are companies that have taken the other tack of saying all email is completely open and searchable. That's interesting, but it doesn't actually deal with the bulk and volume and efficiency that comes with copies and modifications of copies and so on. So, rant over, you will end up using email for lots and lots of things.

But if you do work that requires iteration, cooperation, collaboration, please don't assume that just because you've got an email account, that you're all set, it's a rotten tool for those purposes. So, rant over, let's talk about web based collaboration, just one second. We're back with a completely different screen. So web based collaboration on doesn't exactly an only refer to things that run in a web browser. It's kind of the general case solution. But as the world of apps that's been opened up by mobile platforms start with iOS specifically, but now expanding on to Android, as apps get more capable, there are collaboration platforms that aren't necessarily browser centric.

For the most part, I tend to see things show up in the browser on the desktop. And if they're robust, they match the checklist that I gave you for evaluating SAS and cloud based systems. Hopefully, they've got a beefy app, hope, beefy app for mobile or for tablet, on maybe dedicated apps for desktops. And in addition, hopefully, they've got a very robust API, I want to talk about a couple of them in particular, that you're you're reasonably likely to run into that. I've got direct experience with running and I found to be far more effective than email and documents already did that ran but what are we talking about when we say web based or cloud based collaboration? We're talking about an assumption that people can get to online on the net from somewhere, and hopefully, to some extent offline.

Real effective collaboration isn't just big single documents. If you look at emails, lots of little messages, if you look at I am, it's lots of little teeny tiny messages on collaboration platforms that I've seen, work effectively, tend to take chunks of chunks of communication, pictures, text, whatever, and make those relate to one another and flow along in a way that feels very, very natural. It doesn't require you to do the organizational work of deleting things, organizing things, sorting things, etc. Because you won't do inboxes or any Judge of it. So generically speaking, collaboration tools that assume reasonably constant broadband connection and Probably some use from mobile platforms is what I'm talking about. The big dog, the little dog in the big space, the big dog and little space on the originator of some really terrific practices.

And you may have heard of it is a project management, web based project management system called Basecamp. The company behind it's 37 signals, very, very smart guys. They pioneered a bunch of stuff that people have copied for a long time. We use Basecamp. For our business for multiple years. It has changed substantially since we shifted away from base camp.

And what I've got here is a quick snapshot of base camp as it runs today for an external project that I'm somewhat involved in but base camp said look, project management in the old fashioned let's keep track of managing multi million dollar construction projects isn't what people Need, they need lightweight. See it right there. My favorite example of base camp and how its engineered for human beings is this. In old style project management, if you put something a task in a in a to do list, you frequently had to assign hours or days or whatever to it. JOHN is going to code the new interface and we're allocating 12 hours for john code, the new interface Basecamp says, put it in a to do list give it someone, they're an adult, they'll figure out how long it takes or how much work it's going to be or what else it's connected to, to a reasonable extent.

That's a big leap, right? Because it pushes a bit of the responsibility back on the person. What's this cryptic thing that says code user interface? It's or I'm a grown up, I know what it is or I'll go look and figure out what someone said it should be. But don't burden me with so much overhead keeping track of that thing that I stopped using it or that we have to have a full time project. Manager just to keep track of the nuts and bolts of the project and not to do any actual work.

So we got a discussion flowing along here in Basecamp for this video market explaining fun video marketing explain a THON, which I'm sure will be long passed by the time you see that, and people are going back and forth. And it's really easy to jump in on the thread and say, yes, no discuss it. Likewise, if there are files, they're dead easy to get to there, right there. I'm on a snappy net connection. But notice how quickly that pops up on a browser. I can see it.

I can see when it was touched all of that kind of stuff that makes this just a pleasure to use as a calendar. You can set up separate projects. When we use Basecamp. For our business for a couple of years, we would set up a Basecamp project per client. So now the people in the company and we invite 234 people, however many we're working with from The client company, give them a login, we're paying for base camp. They're not give them a login.

They log in use it for the duration of project they'd be done. It was very effective for most of them. It was kind of Oh, wow, this is much more useful than the stuff we have to contend with inside a big company. What I found wasn't working was that they were forgetting to login. And what I found wasn't working. And this applies more to base camp and it's old, more project de modality was that it still felt like work and tracking of work, not back and forth, give and take kind of get in the groove of keeping up with stuff.

So we shifted to a different platform about 18 months ago called podio. I've been extraordinarily impressed and extremely happy with what it's done for our business. podio was a startup out of, I think Denmark, when we picked the platform up 18 months ago. blew me away. I said, these guys get it. And they got bought by a large company large US company called Citrix.

That's a good sign. I know they're not going to go away. I'm confident about him. I'll give you a just a glimpse of the stuff that podio is and does. And I may have to do a little screen blurring so you don't get to read all the ins and outs of our business. But briefly, in this podio workspace, we've got multiple people, some inside the company, some externally, who are all collaborating, all doing this bit of business on this one platform.

If you've used Facebook, this constant stream of stuff may look familiar to you. The Facebook wall just sort of keeps going on and on. podio takes a very social media esque approach to work and if I said, Guys, I'm just demoing this nor can spell either and they're gonna die. demo it and they're gonna realize I'm demoing ignoring it, it's gonna roll all along off the bottom. If I wanted to jump in and comment on that, if someone else had said that, I could say no really ignore it. And that sort of stream of activity is really one of the backbones of the thing.

To podio iPhone app, the podio Android app, and in particular, the podio iPad app are terrific. Sometimes they feel more usable and more snappy than this very good web version of podio, which is kind of the home row for the thing. So one of the bits about podio. That's, that makes it work that suits it really well. The work is the social like mechanisms. I can follow an app and say I want to know when something changes there.

I can follow a person I can follow a person. I can follow the activity stream, I can separate work into different buckets. So that's, that's one Have the pieces of it. The second piece, which is really really amazing and has led us to bring more and more aspects of our operation onto podio is that it's got an an application engine built into podio. That doesn't require it guys and developers to use and change and adapt. Let me give you a conventional example.

And that's a demo workspace. I used to kick the tires on apps. I went looked in the App Store, which I'll show you in a second. I said, Well, are there apps podio terminology? Are there apps that sit on podio? That would let me keep track of companies.

So yes, there's an app where I can enter all of the stuff you might enter about an app. I'll keep it really light right now. Right? lightweight for now, name, address and stuff like that and save it. So I've now got just the excellent company in that In that set of records about companies, I wanted to add a contact. This guy named Fred, who's the CEO, at the excellent company.

Here's the trick. This, this app is looking up stuff. In the other app. They're actually related, not quite relational in a full database sense. But they're related. I could have two or three or four, six contexts from one company, I could have transactions or multiple transactions from one company.

And all of that's done in this app here. Here's the cool thing. If I said, you know what we really want to know, birthdays of our clients. It's not in the app. I don't have to wait for someone to bring out a new version of the software. I can jump in and say, You know what, let's keep track of birthdays.

And I'm just going to add that kind of field to the up, and presto, voila, I can now jump back into Fred's record. And say, I happen to know that Fred's birthday is whatever the heck Fred's birthday is. You get the idea. Dun, dun, I just made a change to the structure that app. That field is now on all those records. It's going to be empty for previous records.

But going forward, I can get people to fill it in. That's an amazing capability to have sitting inside of this container. And the alerts and the activity updates. And the follow capabilities pertain to apps, even apps that you write yourself. So we've built out apps podio apps in our workspaces to keep track of customizing videos and delivering delivering pieces of content to some of our content. And it gives us a running log of that.

And anyone can look at it and I can spin tasks off of the app and on and on. It's it's a terrific platform for collaboration. The pricing may change. So we'll get specific about pricing, but it's just ridiculously low on if you're running a kind of business where multiple multiple people need to be coordinated, and need to keep track of stuff. This is my favorite solution of the ones I've seen in the market. There are others.

But this is this is a very, very distinctive spin on collaboration. Last one, I'll mention it's absolutely worth looking at. If your company is a bit bigger or is getting a bit bigger. It's more like big base camp. It's not like podio unless it's changed substantially. Copper project copper project comm is it started in Australia.

I don't know if their market basis primarily us at this point, but Gord project management app, they have a cloud hosted version. They used to have an open source code base or a purchasable code base, I think both. So you could bring the copper project servers in house that's really relevant if you're wanting to get in to the scale where you're going to have in house it here you want to do integration that requires a server sitting right there. It's kind of against my it philosophy to do stuff like that. But copper project is one to give a very serious review to go there. their customers, our marquee list of wow companies, including everyone's favorite fruit computer company, so copper project, take a look at it.

Basecamp if you're working with engineers or business clients, if you're working with corporate clients Basecamp they're likely to run into just because the 37 signals guys have been around a long time, and they're very good at what they do. If you're starting from scratch, if I was starting another company from scratch tomorrow, I wouldn't hesitate. I'd start with podio. And then I'd start adding pieces on from there. But I would start with podio right off the bat, because it's been that cotton pickin effective for us. In the later other section about integration, I'll talk about how we've integrated stuff with podio.

Using using an outside system to handle the integration DO IT guys outside system. last little comment about podio this is kind of a bonus. If we wanted to let companies enter stuff themselves. They don't actually have to get onto podio to do it. podio This is amazing that they pull this off podio automatically exposes a webform. We could say you know what we want your telephone and address and that's it.

And I can take that little bit of code, tell it what domain and put it on paper. That webform up on our website, and someone in the outside world could put in the data, it drops right into our workflow system in podio. To let us get on with things, answer their request, deal with their helpdesk issues or whatever. So take a serious look at podio. If you're evaluating a collaboration platform, the abstract look at how you do things when you're not at work, and see what kind of rhythms and habits fit you and fit the people that you're working with. I don't tend to spend as much time on social media, some of the folks in our company, but the social media ask flow in podio seems to suit us really, really well.

There are other people that do the same kind of thing with Google Docs and Google calendars, and they're super happy with it. And as I said, there are lots and lots of platforms that I'm not mentioning, suit the toolset to your work. Look for the kind of extensibility though, that the apps within podio Give you because it's terrific not to be locked into the set of functions that some designer and some software developer said, were sufficient to your needs. It's very nice to be able to extend it without a lot of effort, break some rules, make some mistakes, but be in control of your data going forward. So that's it for collaboration. It's a 24 hour discussion at best, but that's a lightweight view of what we do and how well it works.

Hope it was helpful. One last thing about podio that I forgot to mention because it's new this week and it's not in my mind yet. The whole section on on presence in I am and usefulness of I am in chat in business, all valid stuff. But then the guys that podio totally upset the applecart by adding chat right into the podio platform. There's still some things that we're not loving about it. There's just some things we like about Hall.

That's Our use so far, but to have I am back and forth chat and presence, integrated and built right into a collaboration platform is really, really useful. By the way. Basecamp has a web based chat platform I am platform called campfire. We didn't actually use it, but I know it's there. So they've they've addressed this problem. I don't know how integrated it is, but they've addressed this problem as well.

But chat has been added into podio. So when you're looking at instant messaging as a way of tying together people, that's a solution to consider. very much looking forward to trying it with clients who are usually enthusiastic about working with us on podio. When I can get back and forth quick answers from clients, our ability to be effective goes up. So yay for podio Good job guys. You added chat.

And that's my addition to that section thanks