MyOffice: Facebook Social Project Management

I discovered a Facebook app a few weeks ago called MyOffice, which provides a social project management capablity within Facebook.

Basically, you can define projects, which have tasks, events, discussions and files, and then you can invite other FB users to participate in obvious ways.

There is a global view, which shows a dashboard of all your projects. You can then select a single project to actually do work. Here you see a project I created called "Xmax". The overview tab presents a time-ordered list of project updates:

Clicking the Tasks tab leads to a list of tasks. Tasks can be assigned to others and assigned a date for completion.

Facebook | MyOffice, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

At the moment there is no way to track time spent on tasks, so MyOffice won't help in that regard.

I am a really big fan of blog-style social media as a major element of social project management. MyOffice is pretty rudimentary in that regard. MyOffice provides a project Discussion, where topics can have posts associated with them:

There is a neat Digg-like thumbs up/thumbs down capability, although I am not sure how relevant that is in small scale project teams. I would rather see a more standard post/comments capability. In fact, this for me is a show stopper.

The solution has a schedule, which consolidates dated tasks and other events -- meetings, milestones, deliverables, whatever:

Files can be uploaded and shared:

There is no versioning supported, so this is very basic.

All in all, a small, basic, free social project management system. In and of itself, I can't see it competing with Basecamp or Huddle, but for avid Facebook users it may prove useful for small teams.

The systems allows people to make projects public, and then others can browse them and join them. Seems a bit odd to me, but perhaps with better descriptions and search it would be useful in some way. I see the biggest use will be for the more standard private, 'by invitation only' projects.

Comments

[Mike Doeff]

Interesting. I'm not sure that I would use this for work but this type of tool might be useful when multiple people are involved in organizing a social event - e.g. a party, a group outing, planning a trip, etc.

[Paul Chaney]

Thanks for the heads-up on MyOffice. I want Facebook to be my professional social network of choice. In order to do that to happen, more business-related apps like this need to be created.

[Dave Whittemore]

Hi Stowe, thanks for the review! We're working on a bunch of the improvements you suggested. It's been great to get a lot of interest from users after launching the application. Our plan now is to incorporate most of the feedback we've received and turn MyOffice into a robust social project management tool, so stay tuned for future updates and feature rollouts!

Mike - the projects you mentioned - parties, trips, etc - are perfect for MyOffice.

[Natalija Trajchevska]

I found your post very interesting and I strongly recommend ProjectOffice.net, an online project management tool that provides all-in-one functionality: managing projects and tasks, time management, issue tracking system and increased team collaboration through wikis.
ProjectOffice.net is a web-based solution that offers basic project management functionality and enhanced collaboration for its users and their teams.
It is completely free of charge and can be used after the one-step registration has been completed. With ProjectOffice.net, individuals and teams can create projects and tasks, can assign tasks to project members, can track time, expenses and issues and can use wikis to boost collaboration and knowledge sharing.