When you’re working together with a team on a project, very quickly you’ll have bits and pieces of the project in a thousand different places. A task list in one app, documents saved on different computers and Google Docs accounts, various emails and IMs about the project elsewhere, and time tracking in yet another app. All of your digital tools are simply dragging the project down.
Teambox is a project management web app that aims to reduce this confusion and help you manage everything about your projects from one page. No matter how many projects you’re running or how many people are in your team, you can keep all of your data flowing together so you can access it quickly from your desktop or mobile browser. Let’s look at Teambox’s features and see if it’s the project management app your team needs to get organized again.
Getting Started
From the front page to the app itself, you’ll notice that Teambox includes a streamlined and simple interface designed to make it quick and easy to use. It also uses much less complicated pricing plans than most other project management web apps. All accounts let you have an unlimited number of users, so you can choose your plan based simply on the number of projects and amount of storage you need. You can get started with the free plan with 3 projects, or choose a larger plan if you know you’ll need it.
Pricing plans that make sense
Once you’ve created and activated your account, Teambox will show you an example account screenshot to help you quickly get familiar with the tools it offers. Click the image when you’re ready to get started setting up your first projects.
Get a glance at an active account before starting your own
Adding New Projects
Adding new projects is quick and straightforward. Just enter your project and organization’s name, invite others to the project, and click Create Project. You can also choose to enable time tracking or make a project public; if you don’t choose these now, you can always add them to a project later.
Creating a project is straightforward
You can add people to a project here that don’t have access to your other projects, which is a great way to let clients join in on a project without adding them to your whole company’s system.
Using Teambox
Teambox is built around a central dashboard that shows all of the activity in your projects in a Facebook-like interface. You can leave a comment about what you’re working on right on the dashboard, or jump to Tasks, Calendar, Time Tracking, and Files from the top menu bar.
Quickly jump to any part of your projects in Teambox
Tasks
When you’re first getting your project going, the most important thing to add will be tasks. Teambox does a great job at making tasks easy to add, edit, and organize. You can assign a task to anyone in your team, add important files and a schedule to the task, and add notes to it as the task progresses. Then, edit the task by clicking on its name, or drag it on the left to rearrange tasks as you need.
Adding, editing, and arranging tasks is easy
Unlike a simple to-do list, you can’t just check off tasks; you’ll need to edit the task and change its status to Resolved to show it’s finished.
Files
Teambox doesn’t just help you keep up with important tasks and data, it also lets you keep files together with your projects. Whether you’ve added an image to a post on the dashboard or uploaded it directly from the Files tab, you’ll be able to quickly access them all in the Files page.
Any file you need, Teambox can keep safe with your project
Projects
As your project progresses, you can see how your time is scheduled out at a glance with the integrated calendar and Gantt chart. Since you can add a schedule and anticipated time directly to tasks as their created, you won’t have to spend much time getting the calendar ready for your team. You can also subscribe to the iCal formatted calendar in your favorite desktop app so you’ll know the schedule even when you’re offline.
Just because you’re using a web app doesn’t mean you can’t have Gantt Charts!
Even as your projects grow, you can still stay informed about the tasks being completed, files uploaded, and more from the dashboard. Teambox even works great on iPhones or other modern mobile devices with a clean mobile web app, so you can stay connected to your projects on the go.
Overview
Conclusion
Teambox is a nice, simple project management app that manages to take much of the complexity out of project management. We enjoyed its clean and speedy interface, and the mobile dashboard made it stand out among competing project management apps. It includes everything most teams will need to stay productive and focused in a quick, social way.
Another interesting thing about Teambox is that it’s an open source project as well as a hosted web app. If you find Teambox too expensive for your company or would prefer the customizability of an app hosted on your own servers, you can run the open source version yourself and tweak it as you’d like. For most users, the hosted option will be simpler, but it’s always nice to have a roll-your-own option as well.