The ProjectSpaces user interface is simple enough so that project teams, field office staff, and other users who don't have time to learn how to use a new technology can easily start using it without a significant learning curve. Performing routine team collaboration actions such as uploading and downloading documents, commenting, creating folders, posting announcements and events, etc. is easy enough for even the most technophobic users to figure out. We have also evaluated and implemented Sharepoint, and for some reason the interface confuses many users trying to perform these simple actions, leading to low adoption rates. ProjectSpaces is also designed to be lightweight to facilitate faster load times for users in low bandwidth situations.

Easier site and workspace setup and administration

ProjectSpaces offers superior ease-of-use for both site and workspace administrators. It is intended to be easier to set up and administer at both the site level and the individual workspace level so program staff can administer and configure their own workspaces and not burden central IT staff with day-to-day administration tasks such as workspace setup and configuration, adding users, changing user rights, etc. To properly set up a team workspace in Sharepoint requires someone that knows what they're doing to turn on and off various web parts, configure views for different document libraries and other content, make new content appear dynamically on the team workspace home page, etc. Even for a fairly experienced Sharepoint user, this can take several hours if not more. Lastly, ProjectSpaces makes it easier to manage in-house users and external users such as independent consultants, project team members, field staff, and others which can be cumbersome to manage on Sharepoint. Note that we can support integration with existing LDAP directories, while still providing flexibility of adding and managing external users not on your LDAP.

ProjectSpaces allows user comments on documents, announcements, and other content. This is great for collaborative editing activities, and helps eliminate unnecessary e-mails. Sharepoint doesn't allow commenting on content such as files in a SP document library. In addition, unlike Sharepoint, ProjectSpaces allows users to send e-mail notifications to other users when they publish content, which again is a key way in ensuring adoption. Sharepoint requires individual users to subscribe to notifications, which doesn't afford enough control, and tends to flood users' e-mail boxes with too many autogenerated and irrelevant notifications. ProjectSpaces announcements also allow commenting which can be used as a team blog - again, a great way to reduce e-mail volume and capture team communications that can be referred back to more easily than e-mail.

ProjectSpaces provides a writeboard or shared online document that allows users to create a document that can then be collaboratively edited online by a group of people rather than downloading a file, making changes, and uploading the file. This can be great in low bandwidth situations, as well as for groups looking to avoid the complexity of a number of people tracking changes in Word for example. Users can then see previous versions and edits by other users.

For more technologically sophisticated users, ProjectSpaces does provide RSS feeds and iCal feeds for announcements, documents, and events. RSS feeds are available at the folder level for documents.

Sharepoint does not have a very usable file management tool. It can be fairly confusing for groups to set these up properly, and fairly mundane activities like seeing the metadata associated with a file is not obvious to the average user (SP requires users to mouse over file name and select "view details" to access this information - many users will miss this nuance.). Simply clicking on the file name in SP initiates a download instead of displaying the file metadata. This can be very annoying in low bandwidth situations.

Moreover, SP folders and document libraries behave the same way as Windows file folders, in that you must upload each file into one and only one folder. ProjectSpaces folders on the other hand allow a user to associate a file with more than one folder, which can be helpful if a group wants to categorize their files and more than one way. For example, a group might want to keep file folders for different content types such as presentations, reports, deliverables, etc. and at the same time categorize these files by topic, or by geography. In ProjectSpaces, a presentation on malaria in Nigeria can be tagged so that users searching for content by content type, topic, or country can find that presentation easily.

ProjectSpaces includes a tab for managing a project work plan, which allows teams to create hierarchical lists of tasks and subtasks and track their status. Data can be exported into Excel or Word for reporting purposes. This functionality is well suited for USAID projects. We can also implement custom monitoring and evaluation functionality as needed.

You have the option of either using online discussion forums or traditional e-mail list serves. These can also be easily deployed for external user groups as needed to support project activities. Many of our clients use a ProjectSpaces discussion board or email list to support engagement with target audiences and to develop online communities and user groups with stakeholders in the field.

We can host ProjectSpaces on our Rackspace servers (let us know if you want more information about our hosting infrastructure and security) or you can host it yourself. Also, if you want to pilot test it, you can start out with us hosting it for you and then migrate it to in-house servers if you and your users are satisfied with it.