This is a review of Producteev by Charles Lau.

In today’s Internet, we have blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, wikis, and all other sorts of webware that we can lay our hands on.  The Internet is also finding ways to make you platform independent with all the software that you are using such as office productivity software (with Google Docs), email software (with Gmail) and image editing (with Picnik).

How about managing your projects and tasks with your job?  You have been a really busy executives and managers, and you would really hope how you can make your work more efficient.

Well in fact, one of the most time-consuming tasks in your project(s) is the task of managing the priority of all the actual tasks.  You would hope to know what you need to do today, and what your staff are doing in exactly the way you wanted.  You don’t have to micro-manage them, in order to manage what they are doing today, tomorrow and the day after.  All you need to do, is to manage the actual task overview of each employee.

Introduction to Producteev

Today, I am going to talk about Producteev.  It is an intuitive and fully drag & drop-able solution to collaborate with your colleagues over shared projects and tasks.

How did I manage to find this site?  I chance upon this site through Chris Brogan on twitter.  And I thought this is quite a good addition to our world wide web!

Here’s a summary of what Producteev is:

• In a nutshell, you can create tasks for yourself or to assign to members of your team, and you can then leave comments on these tasks as your project evolves with time.
• You will be accessing to a lot of useful task-management features such as file management, reminders, a calendar and numerous third-party applications such as mobile apps, desktop and IM bots.
• You will also be able to manage both the tasks as well as to-do lists, and communicate efficiently with your team.

In fact, as you can see, it is still in beta version currently.  Even though the software is already in place, they must be still trying their very best to test the software first before they make it official.

Overview of Producteev

You will see boxes of to-do tasks on your dashboard when you log into the system.  And on every box, you will share your tasks with your colleagues, or to make it private.  You are free to create a new box whenever necessary.  (See below)

There is also a live feed section for you to find out what your colleagues have done in the tasks.  This live feed also allows you to message your colleagues, upload a file to the message, and even to message privately. (See below)

You can also upload files onto the server.  Your colleagues can also comment on it. (See below)

Any other features on top of that?

Simply said, this is what Producteev is all about.  And they surround their features to be compatible with different mobile devices.  On top of that, you can also sync Producteev with the various services such as twitter to update your tasks!

Interview with Producteev CEO

I have been able to interview the founder and CEO of Producteev.  His name is Ilan Abehassera.

When I approach Producteev, I wonder if they are going to accept my interview questions with my current startup of this blog.  Never did I knew that Ilan is a really approachable person who not only answered all my questions immediately, he even added me in his LinkedIn account.  Wow! Thanks Ilan.

Here’re the questions I have interviewed on 2 April 2009:

1) When did you start to have this idea of starting this website?
Ans: I had the idea 2 years ago, and starting working on a prototype 1 year ago. I finally decided to start a company around it on July 8, 2008

2) How long have you been working on this site?
Ans: Since June 1st 2008, so 10 months

3) What’s your vision of this site?
Ans:  ”Producteev is building the first productivity platform developed on top of the tools we all rely on every day (email, IM, mobile, desktop, outlook, gmail, google docs,…)”

Group Task Management is still a largely unsolved problem : emails or IM are used as our main tool to assign tasks to colleagues, but we can all agree those are not efficient to manage and track tasks and projects. 

=> With Producteev.com, we help you centralize tasks, projects, internal communication and files by using whatever communication service you rely on.

4) What is the server technology behind?  Why is the server able to support all of our information in terms of space and bandwidth?
Ans: We are based on the LAMP stack, with 2 servers (1 web server + 1 mysql server) 

5) How many of you are working on maintaining this website?
Ans: 3 full time 

6) Will there be any always-ongoing research to further improve the system?
Ans: Of course, we have a huge roadmap ahead of us, and just recruited a mathematician that will build a better algorithm to prioritize tasks (but sshhhh, this is a secret!)

Conclusion

First of all,  I would like to thank Ilan for the interview in this blog post.  His other two colleagues include Aric Lasry (Co-Founder and Lead Developer) and Simon Dawlat (Director Product Marketing).  They have a lot of experiences before they work on this project with Ilan.  You may find out more about them in their “about us” page.

Looks like Producteev is progressing as I have just checked Ilan’s twitter that they are employing their first employee!  Congratulations!

Producteev certainly has potential as this very simple task management can be quite complicated when it involves two or more people.  I can tell you that because I have been working in an office and most of our time is to keep our tasks insync!  We’ll see how this project is going to evolve into!