First, let me say that e-room is the only collaborative tool I've used, but I used and loved it long time. Of course, when I used it, I was inside the enterprise of Ketchum, and we used the full-blown version. There were many cool things about using e-room to service a client using global resources within the then-vast Ketchum network.
A dedicated e-room became the little organization used by the team to do, save, deliver, review, modify, and complete work, securely, with the client invited in (or not) as appropriate, to make changes and approve deliverables.
Now I find myself with my own business (of 1) this last year, with some of the same clients, without the talented resources to share my overflow of work with, and without access to the expensive technology. This lack of secure workspace, in my opinion, is the ONLY thing big agencies and consulting companies have over the little guys right now. We have the rates on our side. We now have the talent on our side (since they've had to cast off expensive senior talent). We've even got the NETwork -- but we don't have a good way to work together across that network.
We lack a centralized office from which to work, a place to assemble teams for specific clients, a place to upload work, a place to review work {writing, designs, media lists, messaging, etc.}, a place to drop notes on specific projects that don't slide down your inbox, a place where if one of us drives off a cliff we're not asking their spouse at the funeral if they wouldn't mind us stopping over to check the hard drive, a place to invite clients INSIDE to review and finalize changes, a place to store signend NDAs so our asses aren't exposed, a place where knowledge grows AMONG the deorgged bunch of us who are out here in blogspace and orkutspace, either working for others or working for ourselves, who could easily join forces and deliver AMAZING work quickly if we *had* a place to work.
Here's a quick screen clip from inside a sample e-room. This particular e-room is set up for a project team. The only thing I did was add the press release folder to show what kind of folders you might use. You can delete the folders that come in the templatized room and make your own, or you can use some of what they pre-populate the room with:
In an e-room setup, you can copy and paste files from your hard drive into the folders hosted at e-room.net. You invite team members. You assign them privileges--can they read, write, edit, delete, etc. It tells you if someone else is in the document. It's easy to make new folders and to edit documents and to track those edits. You can vote on versions, you can leave notes for your teammates, etc. Everything's safe up there. Create a client review folder and let them in to do their thang too.
I think that an affordable, elegantly simple, hosted, collaborative solution is lacking for bigco castoffs across the net, in blogland, and on orkut, who could share on some good projects if we had a way to work together.
Forget outsourcing to other India and forget paying a BigConsulting $250/hr. The brains for that stuff are sitting in their livingrooms here, in Trinidad and Tobago, in Australia, along the East Coast, in Boulder, freezing in Toronto, conference hopping from Boston, and ready for work here, here, here, and all over the net.
Intersource it to us!
But we need a place, space, somewhere to work. We need an uncompany. The only way to be safe from another reorg is to deorg. [[domains ripe and ready.]]
DO I HAVE A WITNESS UP IN HEA'?!!?!?
