In the wake of the coverage on Gizbuzz of Zoho Projects, I received an email from another Project Management service launched two months ago called Teamwork Live, which claimed it was better than Zoho Projects, and that I should take a look.
At first glance, Teamwork Live looks like a very strong product. It boasts features which as far as I know are unique, such as access to project information offline and a user- rather than company-centric approach, which in theory should make it easier for individual users to track multiple projects with different teams. It also beats Zoho Projects by having a robust notification system, including RSS feeds.
Despite this, I did not like Teamwork Live, for one simple reason. It suffers from appalling UI design. When using it, I had the feeling that it was created by some fantastic developers able to execute complex features, but that no designers had been involved at any stage. The whole system almost always behaves counter-intuitively, without any obvious reason for doing so.
Whilst there are too many cases of this to mention each one, a specific example is the tabs across the top of the page. Despite having spend a reasonable length of time with the program, I cannot remember exactly what is on each tab, with the exception of the ‘calendar’ tab. I created a new project from the ‘my teams’ tab. And how is the user supposed to know at a glance what the difference between the ‘my teams’ tab and the ‘my teammates’ tab is?
The only reason I can imagine it has any users is the fantastic help system, including detailed video tutorials. This service is only going to appeal to those who desperately need all of its features, and who have several hours to spend getting to know the service. I cannot imagine that there are many such users.
Update: Tuyen Truong of Teamwork Live has posted a follow-up comment below.
Thanks for the hard-hitting review Huw. We take negative feedback very seriously and plan to use this review as an opportunity to improve our product.
I invite everyone to give TeamWork Live a test drive and form your own opinion of the product. We believe that we have something in place that will meet the needs of people whose project management needs have outgrown Basecamp. We have some happy converts already. There are still some rough edges in the product but we are working hard to address them. We hope to improve TeamWork Live in the coming movings to the point where we make a convert out of Huw.
Regards,
Tuyen
[...] I reviewed project management system Teamwork Live a little while ago on Gizbuzz. It didn’t get a good review; despite an excellent, possibly best in class feature set, the UI was a usability disaster. At the time, I said: Despite this [good feature set], I did not like Teamwork Live, for one simple reason. It suffers from appalling UI design. When using it, I had the feeling that it was created by some fantastic developers able to execute complex features, but that no designers had been involved at any stage. The whole system almost always behaves counter-intuitively, without any obvious reason for doing so. [...]
GizBuzz,
I have only been using Teamwork Live for a few weeks now and do not know what it was like at the time of your review. You may want to revisit and re-review their product though – I think it is fantastic. Our company used to use Groove/Team Direction for our project management and decided to move to a hosted solution making it easier and more affordable to add contractors and clients to our workspaces. We were beta testing Office Live / Groove and hoping it would turn out to be everything we wanted – I won’t go into explaining all the reasons why it has turned out to be a disappointment, but it has. I have been testing out many tools (some I only spent a very short time with as I was immediately able to assess that they did not meet our needs). These include: AutoTask, @Task, Projity, Zoho, 4Team, Central Desktop, BaseCamp, and just recently Teamwork Live.
We originally liked AutoTask because it combined CRM, Support Tickets, Billing, and Project Management into one application. But being web developers we really needed a project app that allowed us to create tasks via a rich text editor and to be able to message well regarding the task. This is just one of the short comings (AutoTask is still a superior solution I believe for certain company types). AutoTask did not seem open to addressing our requests, so we dropped their service. 4Team was very affordable and we used them for a few months, but it was a bit clunky and just plain buggy in the way it tried to synchronize with outlook.
We have been using Central Desktop for the last 4 months or so and decided that they had the best application out of the bunch. But I was still frustrated with a few things (some of these they will be addressing in the near future). I found our biggest problem with CD was that our only means of communicating with clients via the tool was create questions via task comments or to do in a discussion (in a separate folder) – these could be updated by RSS, which is great by the way, but still was not as effective as we needed. When you have lots of projects going on RSS feeds can be easily missed and lost in the shuffle. But there are a LOT of things to like about Central Desktop – we are still going to use them and see what the upcoming releases churn out.
We discovered Teamwork Live just a few weeks ago. I was initially impressed with the product but found many things lacking. I have been discussing with the developers my concerns. I was pleasantly surprised to find out how quickly they were implementing my suggestions. As it is now, we find it to be a very useable and effective product. We are now considering that this will be our primary project management tool over Central Desktop. What has put this app over the top for us? It is the excellent way Teamwork live allows messaging on a task. We can add comments to a task (these are for those messages that will actually alter the task in some way – additional attachments, changes, etc) or we can message on the task (for questions and discussion). What is REALLY nice about this is that these messages create alerts in the dashboard letting me know there are messages waiting to be addressed. There’s more too it than my brief explanation. You just have to see how it works, it makes for an easy replacement for email and keeps all the messaging tied to relative tasks ( and you can also send by email when messaging by checking a box). I know there are other apps that do this.. But TWL has a lot of other features more in line with a simple and intuitive product like Central Desktop. And they have a great rich text editor for tasks, etc, though no ability to embed images yet
. The have a great “folder” section with a lot of capability.
Central Desktop still has a lot going for it with their database, online spreadsheet, file management, etc.. But the more we are using Teamwork Live the more it is growing on us and the messaging feature just makes it more of an effective tool for us than Central Desktop at the moment.
I think you should revisit their product and give another review and take a closer look this time around.
I should have also mentioned some of my main beefs with zoho since that was the product you were comparing to in your review.
tasks in Zoho are just too limiting, though I do like that they have a percentage complete (not sure why TWL and CD don’t do this – CD claims it is to keep it simple). in Zoho you can’t add attachments directly to a task (this has to be done in the docs folder with a copy/pasted link) and the task itself is limited to basically one line. This may work to give the task a title, but where is the description? Yes, you can add notes, but its just not as effective and neither the task or the notes provides a rich text editor.
I do like the way Zoho allows you to organize tasks and task lists ( a lot like Central Desktop) except that in Central Desktop the only way to order task lists is to number them since they are sorted alphabetically. In Zoho you can manually sort tasks lists, which is VERY nice. I also like the view I get in Teamwork Live via the milestone view. There isn’t much sorting capability yet, but the tasks are folded under the milestones and can be expanded for a nice tight view of the overall project.
Reports are very limiting in both Zoho and Teamwork Live and Central Desktop definitely wins in this category.
I like the calendar in both Zoho and TWL being it has the capability to view other team members calendars, CD does not have this capability.
But the real reason we haven’t pursued Zoho more than just a couple of days is because of the way their tasks work (which means they don’t work – for us). But for some company types that just require simply-named tasks, it may work. But then you still don’t have the GREAT way that Teamwork live does messaging.. This is what many of the other tools are missing, and this sets Teamwork Live far above Zoho IMO. You don’t think about this until you really try to start communicating on a project with developers and clients.