When running a small business it is imperative to communicate efficiently with your clients, updating them on the progress of issues, projects and timescales. There are many tools out there to help you communicate and collaborate with your customers. At Northern Lab we use a whole bunch of software, programs and services to communicate and collaborate with our customers more efficiently. From Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, an online helpdesk and numerous other platforms.
One particular platform has been very useful, Project Pier. Project Pier is a fork of activecollab, which was originally released as an opensource platform but later moved to a commercial model. ActiveCollab has some great features, and we wish them luck but for us, the functionallity of the original activecollab was enough. Enter ProjectPier, a flexible, reliable “clone” of activecollab.
We have found project pier to be much more customizable than the original activecollab, the documentation is good and there’s a whole bunch of very talented people involved in the project.
Project Pier allows you to manage projects in an easy, well structured manner. You can assign clients to individual projects or to individual areas within a project. You can set milestones, todo lists, share files, message each other and make sure that the people that need to be involved are involved. We’ve had very good feedback from our customers regarding this platform so if you are looking for a robust and easy way to collaborate with your clients we recommend you try Project Pier, its free and its great.
If you are still using the old activecollab version, we recommend you upgrade to Project Pier, the upgrade is well documented and very easy to implement.