When the very near term inclusion of an outsourced company assisting with our onsite services to our clients became a reality, I very seriously began to look at various collaboration resources. I did not travel the popular Basecamp route here; instead I’m using a product called Central Desktop. Central Desktop very easily edges out the Basecamp route for one reason in this scenario: integrated wiki.

With a goal of keeping the collaboration between my company and the people we are working with as simple as possible, I wanted to keep everything in one place. Central Desktop allows us to have all our collaboration documents, tasks, and Wiki all under one roof. I feel like this makes our life a lot simpler, and over the long run will make the outsourced company more apt to insure that things are updated in the system, especially since their payment is dependent upon it.

I understand that I’m not being the most original or innovative with this approach, but am curious as to what packages other people use and how they combine them to get the best results. Currently we use Autotask for the actual management of what was done and for customer requests, while Central Desktop is used to manage tasks between ourselves and the outsourced company while at the same time document our customers networks via the wiki.