This last weekend I spent in NY with my Mom on her 80^th birthday. That means she was born back in 1928.  Cars had been around since the 1670's, but then they were steam powered, the first gasolinie powered car (like the ones we drive today) was designed and built by Karl Benz in 1885, only about 40 years before my Mom was born. The telegraph, which changed the face of our cities was maybe 50 years old at that time, no fax yet, and computers were at least 20 years off (for 1 of the 3 mainframes IBM predicted they would be making).

For her birthday my youngest brother (another technology afficionado) gave her a Sony electronic picture frame. It was the hit of the party as my brother and nephew had loaded hundreds of pictures from former family reunions which not only rotated through the e-Frame, but could even be controlled by a remote.  When my Mom was born, I am not sure even color photos were available, and Polaroids were at lest 35 years off.  My mom has lived through a lot of technology evolution, and it seems to be going at an ever faster pace..

It is safe to say that most everyone you know has and uses eMail.  Even my mom uses it (on her Mac).  Survey's we have done on the enterprise and their use of different collaboration tools (and eMail is widley used for collaboration even though it might not be the right tool) show that betweefn 93-100% of those surveyed have/use e-mail.

Although I have access to almost every collaboration tool available, I still find myself going to my eMail application (in this case Outlook 2007) multiple times a day.  EMail is used for: setting up appointment or events, sending documents, updating someone on status, and it is fast, easy and works also on my iPhone.  But while those are legitimate (althoug not always optimal) uses of eMail, the bulk of what I get is SPAM.  Even with a variety of SPAM filters, about 80% of my e-mail is junk.  Unfortunatley it takes time to go through that junk and get rid of it, which severly impacts my productivity, and is time I can't really afford.  So what happens?  I just don't do it, and live with the SPAM (my Outlook mailbox is now over 1.5 GB) and I have been looking for a way to make my eMail not only more productive but more collaborative for a long time.

With the new release of their Portal feature LiquidPlanner offers a good upgrade path to those who have out grown BaseCamp.  The portal, allows you to publish any documents from a project (folder) or the whole folder for that matter and make it more public, so you could share it with your clients.  The portal allows some customization so you can put your logo on it, and also the logo of the customer company if needed. Portals are free and can support an unlimited number of users,all you have to do to get on is create a LiquidPlanner ID (free).

A few months ago I took a look at some new project management tools (3 New Project Management Stars on the Horizon) @task, Qtask and LiquidPlanner, and promised to follow up in a later blog with 4 more tools. This blog looks at:  PlanDone, EasyProjects.net, Pie Matrix, and Copper Project. I will post this blog in two parts with 2 tools in each part.

A good example is to make sure you have clear and explicit written agreements detailing how aproject will move forward.Stewart has contributed more rules to this bookthan anyone else except me, and that is nosurprise since he was my co-author for our last book (Collaboration 2.0). He and I have talked about "rules of engagement" for a long time, andI am glad he finally codified some of that wisdom into a rule.