August 13, 2008

Tools of the Trade: Central Desktop

Posted by Kevin | Print This Article

Just a quick review of an online app some staff teams might find useful: For the past ten months or so, my team of 9 staffers has been using Central Desktop (www.centraldesktop.com) to keep track of to-do lists, share/edit documents, and calendaring. I have to say it’s a useful and inexpensive little tool that does exactly what it says it will.

I picked it after looking at several of the other similar groupware-type websites out there, like Basecamp, and found them a little too complex for our needs. All I really wanted was for a way for the team members to assign each other tasks and keep track of them, update documents, and note calendar items, particularly out-of-office times. Central Desktop meets all these very simple needs with a very intuitive interface. It doesn’t feel like you have to learn a new way of doing things.

The document sharing/editing has been very useful; for example, we have a number of complex tracking documents that compare various sales and membership numbers, week by week and year by year. With Central Desktop, the staffers responsible for those areas keep the reports updated online, and I can access them anytime, anywhere.

While it may be nicer to have a more integrated system with our database and website, for our purposes, Central Desktop works well and other small teams may want to take a look at it. You can also set up regular email activity updates (you can set the frequency from immediately to weekly); there is also a secure RSS feed option that looks kind of interesting, but I haven’t played with it, finding the email updates good enough for me.

Comments

Leave a comment

Name (required)

E-mail (required)

URI

Your Comments

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail