There is much outrage these days on the Internet, against Apple no less. Apple decided to use Apple Software Update to send its Safari browser to Windows computers.

What people are angry about is not that Apple is offering Safari to its iTUNES users. It's the way Apple is offering it. Basically, it looks like Apple is trying to trick users into getting the new browser. Safari is listed among the other iTUNES and QuickTime updates, with no way to tell it's a new software and not a simple update on software already on your computer.

One could argue that it's up to the users to review the updates before installing.  I think that's a weak argument.

Companies may not be legally bound to be crystal clear in their dealings with their clients, but it is still the right thing to do. The way a company interacts with its clients affects its reputation, and that can make a break it. 

Your reputation precedes you in your market. Being a well-perceived company brings many benefits: first-time meetings with clients are […]

Are you tired of being too succesful at project management? 

1. Don't give details

It’s important to give very telegraphic instructions in the
tasks, so that your team has to guess what you really want.

2. Communicate on a
need-to-know basis

And when your team asks questions about the project, don’t
give clear answers. In fact, your collaborators don’t even need to know what
the project is about and what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s not like it
would help them do their job!

3. Be an optimist

Assume everything will happen as expected. Your planning is
perfect, the way you created tasks exactly follows the way things should be.
And what should be is definitely how it will be. Murphy’s Law does not apply to
project management, after all.

4. Leave no margin
for error in the timeline

No one ever gets sick, leaves the company or needs to take
time off unexpectedly. And your team is so great that they are never late in
their tasks, in fact nothing ever takes longer than planned with your team.

5. Take no
suggestions from your team

It’s not like they know anything […]

I have a bachelor's degree in journalism.  If I met my former
classmates, they would frown at my career in marketing, thinking that I had
gone on the dark side of force, so to speak. 

I think they're wrong. In my mind, journalism and marketing are not quite
different. What changes is the audience and the product. Let's face it, the
more papers a story sells – or the more viewers a TV newscast gets – the more successful
the journalist seems to be. And if a newspaper does not have enough readers,
the content is the first to be blamed.

Marketing and journalism are about reaching out to people

For the marketer, the audience is  the
clients, actual, and future, for the product we are selling. We want our
clients to know about our company and our product, or at least interest them
enough so that they will check it out. 

Journalists want to reach their market as well, except they call it an
audience. They're still the same humans, and what they provide is information
and opinion. Journalists want to reach people so that they will read […]

You know when your user base is turning into fans when people start making tools to improve your product. They are so committed to your product, they are willing to improve it themselves. 

To the creator of the product, this is one of the most rewarding gestures a user can make.

Jason Skowronek has been using AceProject for a long time, and, as he explains on his blog, he needed to be able to reuse user licenses. For example, when someone leaves the company, he would need assign that user license to someone else.  Currently, in AceProject, Jason would has the following choices:

• Rename that user (and keep the former employee's history attached to the user)
• Delete the user (and loose all the time sheets, discussion forums posts, messages this user created), and create a new user for the new employee
• Increase his user license to be able to create more users.

It turns out Jason wanted none of those choices. So he wrote this nifty SQL procedure that "In a nutshell, will re-assign all relevant […]

Since we are in the final testing stages for AceProject 4.5, I thought I
would show you how easy it is to work with project templates in
AceProject. 

Once we start using a project management tool, as more and more projects are created and completed, a need arises for project templates, also called master projects.

It's very useful to be able to import another project's structure into the new project: no need to reconfigure task groups, statuses, priorities, etc. However, once we have that, wouldn't it be nice to also be able to import the template project's documents as well?

And what about tasks? For repetitive projects, it saves a lot of time if you can avoid recreating the same tasks. Once you've imported the template project's tasks, you may want to adjust the task date according to the project dates, so the first task starts on the same day as the project, and so on.

That was the easy part. 

Now comes the real challenge: it would be interesting to be able to dinamically connect a […]

Our colleague Jason from 37signals had a very interesting blog post lately. His post was elegantly summarized in this sentence:

"By building products we want to use, we’re also building products that millions of other small businesses want to use."

Getting a taste of one's own medicine can be an very humbling experience. Granted, not all products can be used by their makers (think industrial products). Nonetheless, both the creators and the sellers of a product would benefit from using their own stuff, if only to understand how easy (or how hard) it is to use it.

In the software business, we often see interfaces that were built by people who never actually use the system. The way the system works is logical, but it simply doesn't make sense from a usability point of view. For example: confirmation pop-ups (are you sure you want to close this window?) are more a nuisance than anything else. Honestly, how often do you actually read the text of those windows? Those things are so annoying we […]

Ever since AceProject has been on the project management software market, we have been receiving request for cutomization.

Most organizations will shy away from custom work because they find it too complicated or too time-consuming. However, in the project management industry, I have yet to see two companies managing their projects the same way. Or track time the same way.

We have seen the custom work business grow steadily over the last 3 or 4 years. In our experience, it's been a great way to build long-term relationships with our clients. We work closely with them before, during and after the work is completed, to make sure they get what they pay for. On their end, our clients get exactly the software they want. On our end, we get to be inspired by the features they ask us to add to their AceProject account.

Sometimes, we decide to add the feature to the standard system and the client gets a rebate on the development costs. Sometimes, we'll implement the feature later on in the standard system, with […]

Spreadsheets are very useful: they can contain formulas, sort data and have all sorts of bells and whistles to them. Spreadsheets can hold a lot of information, in a relatively small space. Spreasheets are convenient.

Say you want to organize an event at your organisation. You make a list of everything you need to do, with due-dates for each task. The spreadsheet works, it helps to make you feel in control of the situation.

Now you need other people to help you with this event. What should you do? Add a column to your spreadsheet with the name of the person assigned to the task, and send the spreadsheet to everyone involved, so they can see what they need to do. 

This is where it becomes tricky.

As each person updates the spreadsheet, multiple versions of this spreadsheet exist. Who has the latest version? Is there even a latest version of it? The spreadsheet sarts being emailed around between the different members of the team. They add status information on their tasks, questions, requirements. The spreadsheet grows.

Soon enough […]

It was not so long ago that web-based software was not deemed trustworthy. What if the Internet service was down? What about the files, would they be safe?

I remember disliking Hotmail because it was web-based only. My inbox size was limited, access was not always possible and there was so much spam!  Ten years later, I'm in love with Gmail, because it's web-based: I've got more inbox space than I could ever need, it's always on and the spam filter is amazing.

What changed? From web-based distrust to a growing interest and need for web-based applications, even the business world is getting onboard. There are several reasons why software as a service is becoming so popular:

• No need to maintain software on users' workstations. This takes a huge load off the IT team's work. Software on user workstations requires permissions to be managed and needs to be updated regularly. When the hardware is upgraded, it also takes time to reinstall all the software. With web-based software, all the IT team has to worry about […]