Simply Teamwork

Special offer: Get your team connected for $100/month

Smaller firms in project-based industries such as interior design, architecture & design are typically struggling with investing in collaboration technologies due to the high-requirements in IT technology. It is especially complicated for smaller firms that are working in a distributed manner.

Although most professionals are connected via email today, it is hard to take the next step to boost their teamworking & online collaboration capability. The reason is that typical appropriate technology like SharePoint & Microsoft Communication Server presupposes a company network, routers, dedicated servers, and IT expertise and support – all things that are typically out of scope for small firms. Also, it is expensive to buy licenses for online tools like WebEx, GotoMeeting for all employees. Add in concerns about security and virtual private networking and it is no wonder that small firms typically pass on the great collaboration opportunities that the Internet is bringing to companies today.

To help the small firm getting up to speed in the latest in collaborative working, Kalexo is offering a special promotion to connect a team of 20 people for only $100/month. That works out to only $60 per employee per year. You get your own virtual network and all the tools your team needs to get your projects done. The only catch is that Kalexo is asking for 5 referrals.

Sign up now before the offer expires.

How to use Kalexo for Business Development and Sales

Although Kalexo Teamwork is designed for project-based industries such as design and construction, we have many users that use it in other ways. One quite popular use is in Business Development and Sales, where tracking a large number of customer engagement is of critical importance. A common setup is vice president and all his reports sharing the burden of interacting with clients and prospects.

How is this done in Kalexo? [Demo]

Typically a dedicated workspace is created for the business unit, and all project members are invited into it. Next at least one thread is created for each prospect, and the core folks that interact with the prospect are added to the thread. A thread description is created giving an overview of the prospect and contact information. Goals that need to be accomplished are entered as checklist items.

Day-to-day operations becomes then pretty straight-forward.

Every time an interaction or some significant event happens with a prospect, add the relevant data / record to the thread. This could be done by anyone in the group. It could be as simple as adding a one line comment, or dropping in a file that the prospect received. When there are email conversations with a prospect, simply file the email into the thread.

This creates in indelible record that makes progress tracking very easy. The history of a business development thread typically reaches back to when the prospect enters into the conversation – and could last months or years.

Also make sure the participant who is taking the next step with a prospect has the ball. If no progress can be made for a period of time, set a due date the next time an action should be taken. Typically due dates advance continually to remind participants that attention is needed – this is easy to see since the thread will turn red when the due date is reached.

If some business activity needs to be put on ice, simply lower the priority of the thread, or set it to none.

Handing off a prospect to another person is as simple as passing the ball (pick it up with the mouse and drop it on another participant). The complete prospect is really convenient for the person who gets the ball – there is no looking for information since it is all right there in the thread.

What happens when you work like this? First, everyone in the group has an up to date view of what needs to be done – nicely prioritized. The VP can easily see what is happening across all deals – without having to be informed by e-mail or in a status meeting. It is also easy to run reports to see what is going on. It also becomes possible to efficiently track a much larger of engagements without driving everyone crazy. Everything is easily organized and searchable.

At Kalexo, we actually have a workspace called “Kalexo Bizdev” which contains all client interactions from the formation of the company onwards. One of our other users have all sales leads in a workspace.

Once you have something like this at your fingertips, there is now way you can go back – it is just so much more convenient.

Learn more about Kalexo Teamwork at the Kalexo web site.

Another Kalexo web site update, and the tools behind the site

The Kalexo web site got another update today, with a Flash animation that gives a better impression of what Kalexo Teamwork is about. We’ve also added live support capability, so you can simply click to chat with someone at Kalexo.  The changes follows us adding the ability to give site feedback last week.

For the technically minded, you might be wondering how we did it. It turns out to be a relatively straightforward thing if you use the right tools. The web site was steadily improved over the last few years, so it is hard to say how much work really went into it overall.

The Flash animation was authored via Swish Max, which is a fantastic tool for the non-flash guru. It comes with a whole bunch of preset animations that are pretty easy to use. I used Adobe Fireworks to do some image editing and cleanup. Screen shots was done with the Snipping Tool, which is a free and included in Vista. I think that most people don’t even realize that this nifty free tool exists – I did not know about it, and used to use Snagit a lot, but I think the latter is overkill if you are doing image cleanups in Fireworks anyway. Developing and producing the Kalexo Flash animation took about 3-days.

The demo video on the Kalexo home page was produced via Final Cut Express for video editing, LiveType for some titles, Camtasia for screen recording, and Microsoft Powerpoint for some animation sequences (PPT is great for some types of animation work, but you don’t get the control you have with Flash). A lot of stock images and videos came from iStockPhoto.  Sound was recorded with a Samson Studio C01U Microphone (which I can’t recommend because of persistent audio level issues). Producing the demo video took about a week, and involved both a Mac and a PC, with shuttling Quicktime movies to-and-fro via a USB memory stick.

The Kalexo website itself is powered via Joomla, a popular content management system. The site template is from JoomlArt with some modifications. We run a lot of custom Joomla plugins on the site, too many to mention here. Even though you don’t have total freedom to create a maxed-out corporate web site via Joomla, it has a lot going for it if you don’t have designers on staff. We often tweak the site “live” to see how things turn out – there is a lot of configuration options, and the collection of off-the-shelf plugins (most of them free) are amazing. One neat plugin is the light-box type functionality which overlays a window over your web site, and is popup friendly.

The live support capability is Live Help messenger from Stardevelop. It allows you to monitor who visits your web site in real-time, and visitors can initiate a chat with a click of a button. A windows application on your desktops allows multiple operators to stand by. One nice thing is since you install Live Help on your web server, you only pay for a software license and there are no monthly fees. However, you need to be tech savvy to install it, since it involves database work, editing HTML, and sometimes some PHP hacking

The feedback capability is from Kampyle – it shows up as a little triangle in the bottom right hand corner of the browser, which when you click on allows you to rate the site and enter comments. The feedback goes into a database which you can access online. Kampyle has a free plan which does pretty much everything you need to get started. Implementation was a breeze (again, you need to edit HTML). The only thing that I wished for was that the free version included email alerts when feedback is left.

I am sure that I forgot a whole bunch of other tools that we use to develop the web site. There are so many options available to do this type of thing, so I hope this post will point DIY-types in the right direction. Please feel free to write me with questions.

Kick to win! competition from Kalexo

Kalexo is running a competition called “Kick to win!”, which involves kicking a ball around.  Should you be wasting your time with it? Yes, if you would like to win a years worth of project collaboration for free, and don’t have anything else to do!

I am not very good at it, but here is my screen shot with an “unlucky” top score of 13 points.

You might be wondering what is the big deal with the soccer ball and Kalexo?

Our project management software, Kalexo Teamwork, has a soccer ball that you can "kick" to a team member to indicate that it is their turn to do some work. The person who has the ball on a thread gets immediately notified, and the thread appears on his/her todo list, conveniently nagging that person until the work is done!

You can also kick the ball to other firms, which is a nice way of saying "Hey! lets not drop the ball on this".

BTW, in the real-world it is considered bad practice to keep the ball in the air, e.g. passing work around like a hot potato and not getting anything done at all!

Have fun!

The tools of Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) and more …

Greg Arkin (Revit3D) from BimBoom has this really neat diagram of tools that are used for Integrated Project Delivery (IPD),  Building Information Modeling (BIM), and Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) which he calls the BIM cycle. One look and your head hurts – there is a lot of tools that you need to know about.

Somewhere down the bottom on the diagram you can also find Kalexo. Greg and his company CADD Centers happens to be Kalexo Teamwork users, and he is also a Kalexo partner.

What is Kalexo Teamwork?

 

 

Kalexo Teamwork is an unified project collaboration tool for professionals in project-based industries such as design, engineering, construction, architecture, and media & entertainment.  Our goal is to break the collaboration barrier between multiple firms working together on a project by providing single application that everyone can use (irrespective of firm) to securely communicate and collaborate over a virtual private network, and incorporating all the most commonly used tools on large and complex projects today and taking inspiration from Enterprise 2.0.

A core concept in Kalexo is creating a project-wide repository of “threads”, which are essentially information capsules related to  issues, tasks, and documentation on a project.  A thread contains a rich record of what has happened on an issue, including files, screenshots, screen videos, whiteboard sketches, checklists, participants, comments, status, deadlines and the like (where all media authoring can be done inside Kalexo Teamwork).  One of the interesting aspects of a thread is that it can be routed between team members via a virtual soccer ball, essentially passing the ball between team members and organizations to ensure that everyone remains accountable. A reporting module allows project managers to see who is working on what at any given instance.

Integrated seamlessly around the concept of threads we have zooming user interface (ZUI) to explore documents with redlining capability, chat, VoiP, video conferencing, presence, status reporting, micro-blogging, screen sharing and presentation capabilities.

To enable seamless integration of all these features, we deploy a small application to the desktop of each project member (in a similar manner to Skype), so that team members can instantly be notified of project events, chat, hold meetings, and collaborate asynchronously.

How Kalexo uses Amazon Web Services

Kalexo uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) extensively to run our service. If you don’t  know, AWS is a cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon (yes, the online bookstore) that essentially provides compute power and storage in a pay as you go fashion. AWS is really interesting for startups like us who do not want to be bothered with managing an own data center, at least in the early stages while the company is growing.  In fact, AWS is a great enabler for many software startups because of the really low cost to get started.  It use to be that some of your venture funding was gobbled up building your own data center, but nowadays your “funding” comes from Amazon and the really amazing infrastructure service they provide.

What is also interesting is that AWS keep on getting better. You need a lot of tools to run a data-center, and there are all these infra-structure things that everyone needs.  If it is something a lot of people need, you can be pretty sure Amazon will be providing help or help in the future. Sometimes we were wondering whether Kalexo should build this new infrastructure now or should we just wait until Amazon provides the service for us.

Kalexo Teamwork users tend to eat up a lot of online storage.  Not only do we back up all the files on Amazon S3, we also store all the millions of image tiles from the documents you zoom and fly through on S3. To save on bandwidth costs, we have caching machines in front of S3 that act as reverse proxies and provide an extra-level of security. If there is something I can wish for is that Amazon provides flat pricing for bandwidth like other co-location services do.

We also use Amazon EC2 instances for compute power.  Each Kalexo Teamwork user has at least one persistent network connection to a server which acts as a virtual message router.  The routers continually pass messages between workspace members and synchronize project data in real-time.  We also use EC2 instances to process all the documents that people add to their workspaces. A master hands out documents to a bank of slave machines, each of which analyze the document. One step is to convert each document into a set of image tiles, which are streamed to users as they fly through their “document landscape”.  The number of slaves depends on the instantaneous document load – we use Amazon CloudWatch to scale the number of instances up or down to adjust to the load. Amazon Simple Queuing Service (SQS) is used to queue processing jobs to the master.  We did initially use SQS as a communication system between masters and slaves, but eventually created our own connector which gave us more control, especially providing a real-time update of job progress from slaves.

We also have a lot of meta-data about accounts, users, and projects that needs to be highly available. We use Amazon SimpleDB to store all this information.  We also use SimpleDB to store event logs so we can get an idea what is happening on our network in real-time.  SimpleDB is great for this type of thing as long as you don’t expect a quick response – the service is not as fast as a local database. We use memcached to cache a lot of the information centrally.  Another wish would be for AWS to provide a memcached service.

We use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) to store a few MySQL databases. These databases  hold transaction logs for workspace recovery, and billing system information. Finally, we use Amazon Cloudfront to serve documentation and demonstration videos.

So in Kalexo’s case, the question is which AWS service we don’t use? 

We do not use Amazon Flexible Payment System (FPS) instead having opted for another payment processor. We also don’t use Elastic MapReduce but it could be something we eventually adopt for processing documents.

So essentially Kalexo uses nearly all the infra-structure services that Amazon provides.  Our monthly bills are typically quite low, the biggest expense being having many EC2 instances running all the time. AWS offers reduced pricing for these via something they call reserved instances – it can cut your bills by 50% in some cases.

Our biggest overall infra-structure expense are all the machines we are leasing from Serverbeach for web site service, caching servers and so on. We are big fans of this company too, and we have some very high power servers running from several data-centers in the US.

I hope you enjoyed the little tour of how we use Amazon Web Services. If you have questions about our infra-structure, please contact me at hannes AT kalexo.com for details.