Working Together To Solve Problems
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.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Hi Scott, Basecamp does have an integrated wiki, though I’ll admit it’s not exactly full featured. At my company, we do use it and it does what we need out of a wiki. (It’s called Writeboards to them)
Good luck with figuring out all the software pieces…you always make great decisions.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:51 am
I also forgot to mention that Central Desktop has a built in Web Meeting function as well. Which is a nice little bonus I think.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Scott,
Sounds like a good approach for you now. Are you planning on moving some of the task outsourcing to Autotask’s ticket our sourcing when available? Also, have you built any LiveLinks from Autotask to Central Desktop? If so, please share them in the Autotask Community, I’m sure many would be interested.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:27 am
So far they haven’t really been integrated. Still working on a few bugs in how we operate the relationship as far as reporting work. The company doing the work has their own ticketing system, we have ours, they bill us for the work, kinda a crazy situation really.
Once our Central Desktop setup is finalized (still tweaking how we input and share data), I would definitely love to see direct links from Autotask to Central Desktop.
It’s really cool to see vendors actually out keeping an eye on blogs though. Makes us little guys feel important.
June 7th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Scott et al.,
We have the ability to do Single Sign On from Central Desktop to other apps. Its a highly secure token based system that would allow a user to have a single-sign-on experience from CD to another app and vice-versa. We currently have this with Salesforce and Fogbugz and a few other proprietary apps (as well as integration with MSFT Identity Server).
Its all possible – and not very expensive.
If there are any AutoTask folks out there….we’d be interested in talking. We really don’t compete.
Isaac Garcia