PM-Appers!+Teambox+Evaluation+Results



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=Overview=

Teambox is a platform for social, collaborative, task management and file sharing. All of this is housed in the cloud and has an intuitive quick-start design allowing for users to work together from multiple locations. When groups or organizations are frustrated by the web of emails and missed deadlines, Teambox is a great solution.

Teambox integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, email and calendar. Because Teambox is so intuitive, it is simple to add new users to your project without overwhelming them with a need for training. The social format of Teambox allows users to follow the work of others, while not being bogged down with too much information and then allows users to easily remove themselves from conversations at anytime.

There are multiple levels of use and plans beginning with the free version. The free for personal use version allows for up to five users on up to five projects and provides them with the majority of the features, except for chat and Dropbox integration. These features require the Business use plan which also gives unlimited projects and better access to support with a beginning price point of $20 per month for up to five users. Teambox also offers educators a 30% discount and has the support of several higher education institutions.

= = =Advantages=


 * Teambox is amazingly simple to use. Synchronizing with Google is important to update  calendars and send notifications to email. Teambox allows users to do this by going to the Settings/Linked Accounts and quickly align their Google account with their Teambox account.
 * Users can also create a task or event directly from an email. For instance, a teammate sends and email explaining why your team should add a page to your website. Without even opening Teambox, you could forward that email to your teambox email address (used only for this purpose) and tag the teammate that needs to create the page and set the due date. This would automatically notify that teammate and add the task to the task list in Teambox.
 * The iPhone/iPad apps are also very simple and seamlessly integrated with the Teambox site. The setup of the iPhone app takes less than a minute and also allows for mobile task and event creation, updates on team progress and view documents.

=Disadvantages=
 * eLearning students may find that there are some tasks that the entire team will be working on. Teambox will not allow users to assign one task to more than one person. They have  done this by design and their reasoning for doing so is:

//"There’s a good reason to have only one responsible person for a task: If there are several assignees, responsibility gets diluted. We want only one person to know the task is waiting for an answer from them. “When everyone is responsible, nobody is”. //

If you would like to work around this, your team will need to simply create the task and copy it for all the people that are involved.


 * Teambox does not have extensive reporting charts such as the commonly used Gantt chart. There is a Gantt chart option, but it will not show the tasks, only the project start and end dates. Teambox has taken note that their users would like this feature to be improved and they have added a better Gantt chart to the Beta version and you can access this version, but if you did not know this were an option you would be disappointed.



=Case Studies=

The Teambox website contains case studies from [|Penn State]and [|University of Michigan] and also a webinar titled, //[|Teambox in Education]//. Our own Duncan McBogg has been so impressed with Teambox that his CU Boulder team is now using [|Teambox as a pilot].

=Demonstration=

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