The ever-growing net-savvy workforce is seeking productivity and collaboration tools to replace outdated work practices, one of which is team-based projects.  More...

Today I am venturing into my first blog with my new employer, Clarizen. The past two weeks ever since I joined Clarizen I’ve been able to quickly ramp up to the new company, new solutions, new people and to figure out the quickest commute (going to miss the bus).

Fortunately for me, it has not been too far of a stretch from what I was doing previously as the User Advocate with Collanos Software. Both Clarizen and Collanos are using the latest web technologies to accelerate team collaboration and move members away from out-of-context email (stale-mail). Whereas Collanos is a P2P team workspaces’ solution, Clarizen is an On-Demand Project Management service. Both aimed at SMBs, both founded abroad (Switzerland and Israel, respectively) and most importantly, both solutions are targeted at a growing netizen population conducting projects with geographically, OS agnostic (either by being cross platform or via browser based solutions) dispersed members.

That being said, they are very different. Collanos is a rich-client that caters to Teams needing to be-in-sync. Clarizen is about Projects – task intensive projects that require timely action by project members and centralized controls to manage the roles, permissions and dependencies of all project components.

Clarizen is catering to organizations that are ready to embrace a powerful AND user-friendly project management collaboration solution that will guarantee user adoption by making the experience EFP: Easy, Fun and Productive. The ever-growing net-savvy workforce is seeking productivity and collaboration tools to replace outdated work practices, one of which is team-based projects.

Yesterday I attended the Project Management panel discussion, at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where Eran Aloni, our VP of Product Marketing, was one of the panelists. Eran sat in ‘good company’ - several other representatives from notable companies in the space: Projity, eProject, Microsoft (Project Server Dept.) and Wrike. The panel was to some extent ‘boring’ as there seemed to be very little disagreement about everything discussed, including the promise of on-demand PM solutions (even from Brian, representing MS) and the enormous market potential for the many vendors in this space.

Key themes emerging from the discussions can be generalized to much of the promise behind Web 2.0 including: Accelerated user adoption and democratization (not only the assigned Project Manager), collaboration not as an after-thought but integrated into the solutions and the SMB consumer being able to afford and benefit from non-trivial, enterprise-class solutions.

Clarizen is out to capture a significant slice of this emerging market, specifically by attracting SMBs that are in need of a comprehensive solution that takes into account the different levels of involvement of project stakeholders. Users will be able to engage with our solutions by digging deep into the admin controls of managing permissions, roles and templates or by keeping things very simple and getting email notifications where they can easily submit their respective project updates. After all, it’s about the user and in projects, by definition, there are many different users. Targeting the Project Manager alone will defeat the purpose of being a ‘Web 2.0’ solution.

I want to use this opportunity to welcome all Clarizen users and visitors, to frequent our Community site to learn more about the latest in Project Management/Collaboration, read our internal and Expert blogs and become active members. We will be providing free access to PM best practices, template libraries and provide the tools to make the site more engaging and interactive. Your suggestions are always welcomed!