Binfire has designed an online project collaboration tool for dedicated types of professionals working toward project goals. Ideally suited for small to mid-sized teams in any size organization, Binfire simplifies project management practices—in real time. Let’s take a closer look.

Binfire is giving users the right project management features to help plan and quickly monitor project progress. Visual cues offer a fresh approach to project management, especially knowing what relevant information project teams need without sidebar distraction. But if users are requiring guidance via context sensitive help, Binfire has an updated blog that gives tips as new program changes and feature rollouts are announced. Phone support is provided for paid plans.

This aspect of a minimalist interface is going to appeal to experienced project managers, especially real time reporting. All things considered, Binfire is one step ahead to give teams the clear cut visibility to better manage and collaborate toward reaching project goals.

Project Management Efficiencies

Task Management. Binfire is focused on standard project management methodology of project tasks, milestones, and work breakdown structures (WBS) to six levels. Setting start and end date, predecessors, and assigning team members are geared toward team progress. In Binfire, you may import tasks from Basecamp, so other teams may assign your team, for example, to help manage prime and sub-contracts.

It is simple–open a task and add a comment, then tag tasks with relevant key words to build search terms. Your own data dictionary would be helpful here to apply common terms to project tasks that support and build robust search functionality.

As you move or reorder tasks as well as add tasks inline, these are automatically renumbered to keep project plans up-to-date.

Users are encouraged to follow tasks and file changes, which you do simply by clicking on the star alongside any element on these pages and receive email notification when changes are made. And it’s ok if you don’t happen to notice task updates. So you don’t miss a beat, unread comments are highlighted “new” until you click through to view.

User Interface. Users will be delighted with Binfire’s flair for user interface design. The Dashboard immediately gives project managers a summary of projects under the headings, Projects Requiring My Attention, and Recent Activity. It is obviously designed to give you the right information as to where your time is most needed.

My Workspaces shows all projects and balloon progress indicators show percent complete to give users the necessary reminders. Then, you may select your project and drill down to its relevant navigation. The project specific user interface is designed well, especially throughout each of the functional areas, to have its navigation available. The project’s Overview page gives you the ability to quickly review Late, Upcoming, and Recent Activity on the project.

If you get stuck anywhere, the Help widget is a text message box within reach to fire off questions or suggestions to Binfire’s support team who will reply by email within 8 hours, most likely much sooner.

Reports. The standard Gantt chart is interactive, enabling you to apply changes to the task title, timeline, and dependencies. The project view is in constant flow so you will see these changes automatically flow through to the task levels.

An elegantly designed Status Report gives users 140 characters to post Twitter like status updates and add comments to others – but hopefully concise.

File Management and Storage Capabilities

Binfire uses Rackspace file hosting services, a leading hosting and cloud computing service provider. From 2 GB on the free plan to as much as 100 GB on the Biz plan, capacity differentiates Binfire from other project collaboration tool competitors and matches some capacity levels of other dedicated file management services.

File management is visible from Project Files that enables team members, based on project settings, to have full or read access. Files are easily uploaded to the Project Files space for meetings and distribution on team relevant tasks. Users are also enabled space in Private Files to upload and store individual files.

Collaborative Activities – Interactive Whiteboard, Document Sharing, Markup, and Chat

Team meetings can be held online to collaborate on documents or to conduct interactive whiteboard sessions. Here’s a scenario.

Through chat, our marketing team extends an invitation to remote team members to mark up the marketing plan. From Project Files, the project leader will select Collaborate alongside the relevant PDF file. Other filet ype document markups are currently not enabled but expected at a later date.

Team members will join you on Project Files and select Collaborate next to the file you will work on. If you want to use a blank page, you would work from the Interactive Whiteboard space. Markups are saved and downloaded as image files for referencing offline.