As an early stage business we have been very impressed at the highly capable and affordable IT systems out there. It’s ever changing but this is our snapshot on 14th July 2009 …

Before going out on our own, in our past firms we used to have IT departments and PCs running microsoft. In fending for ourselves, we’ve been so impressed by some of the great IT that’s available for early stage businesses and usually very surprised by how inexpensive it all is.

Using Basecamp as Collaborative Project Management Software

Here’s just some:-

Background – our organisation is 5-10 computer persons in size and flexes up and down subject to projects. We’re coming at it with PCs or Macs for individual users, very often with people working from home or other offices. We are not using a company server.

Teleconferencing – we use Skype daily, it is certainly useful for teleconferences with employees, and its free. For something with a slightly more professional feel then powwownow has been good. It’s free to set up an account, the price is in the calls.

Screen-sharing – we use this less frequently, and at the moment generally use dimdim. We started with mikogo but at the time it needed a .exe which wasn’t suitable for the Mac guys on our team. Similarly other systems have spread into this field, including skype.

CRM – Customer Relationship Managment – contact databases etc – currently using Highrise. Generally started with Outlook on individul PCs but the step to share contacts was not intuitive, was unreliable and seemed to require an upfront outlay. Highrise can be free to use initally and then rises to $12 and $24 etc per month packages subject to requirements. It’s good enough for sharing, recording and searching information. To date at Sapien we haven’t had a requirement for large, controlled marketing campaigns, at one client we use Sugar for this, we continually consider trialling salesforce.

Finance Software – there’s lots of PC packages which seem just enough when you get going – Quicken, MS Money etc, even Excel – in the early stages is there that much information that needs to be networked here? In the end though we have been very impressed with KashFlow. It’s a SaaS (software as a Service system). Typical price approx £15 per month and offers a 60 day free trial. It’s very easy to pick-up, is UK accounts focussed, offers some good reports and offers remote access to users. In a number of businesses in the past we have used full-blown MRP (Manufacturing Requirements Planning systems) when running procurement and manufacturing projects. MRP can be an expensive overkill when all we needed was the ability to raise and track purchase orders, for which Kashflow is great – and by default it is already integrated with our finance system.

File-sharing – for straightforward file sharing across a group, dropbox. Synchronisation very stragihtforward. Again starting out is free.

Project Management – for this BaseCamp. Its another 37Signals programme (as is Highrise). Typical fees are $12, $24 per month. It makes running a project in one electronic place no matter where everyone is based geographically or corporaterly very straightforward. Discussions, file-sharing automatically connected to user emails are the most common things we use. It then provides a very useful electronic track record of what happened on the project. It does have other functionality like task-lists but managing this could easily be a distraction from what matters on the project.

Collaborative Documents – since some of us are Mac and some MS users we do use Googledocs. For us, Google has become another arena to save Word-type documents and collaborate on them. It hasn’t the functionality of MS word e.g. range of formatting abilities but it provides enough for useful collaborative benefits. However the lack of functionality on the Google spreadsheet and powerpoint equivalents has meant these haven’t gained traction in our business.