Planning your "thing"

It seems I am a bit behind in some of my blogging due to SAP TechEd and just recently the Office 2.0 conference, which I still need to blog, podcast or video cast my review of day 1 and 2 - one of these days I will get back on top of things I hope.

But all of this made me realize I had not mentioned some of the "planner" app's I tried out. Tracks and Zoho Planner are the two that really hit me the best in terms of ease of use and features and of course "look and feel", Tracks though I downloaded and installed so I decided to stick with Zoho for now.

Considering Zoho also has SSO now it's quite easy for me to jump into each of their applications. So life got quite a bit easier there as well.

I've found that the only way to really get things done is to "plan" your work the problem though is that many apps require so much effort that you don't actually get anything done because you spend your whole day planning what you are going to do. So I decided to see what the online versions had to offer and last Monday I tried them for the first time with multiple people. Last Monday we had a telephone conference and the only reason was because one of the people for the meeting was not there sitting in the room with everyone else, me, so I suggested since the meeting was about SAP at the Office 2.0 conference we use one of the online apps to do our meeting notes, etc. One of the guys logged into Zoho Planner and started a new page and then shared the page with me. Since I already had some notes put together I was able to quickly go in and add notes to the page while they were taking a look at the app and getting a feel for how it worked (hmm that lasted about 3 minutes total, nice easy to use interface)

It was quite impressive when working from a remote location with other people, where as for me personally it was almost a bit of overkill but perhaps I'm not giving it enough credit? With Zoho Virtual Office now up I'll have to go try it out and see how well it embeds data from all the various apps together. Back to working in remote groups though, since this one time worked out well enough in my opinion I decided to test my luck with a second project and that was the planning of the SAP TechEd Bangalore, specifically with the SDN Clubhouse and the SDN Day taking place there. Now those of us involved are all SAP employees but one is located in Bangalore, another New York and me (I'm in between at the moment) and some of the material and things are just getting a bit much to continuously send back and forth. This one I am going to consider my "test" or proof of concept. I told one of the two about the program before hand and the other I told nothing about the program. Trust in the Enterprise or any world for that matter is a big piece of the puzzle.

• Will either of them log in and try it?
  
• Will they continue to use it once logged in?
  
• What do they think about it?
  

Me, here are some of my initial thoughts after logging in:

• Where's my Roadmap?
  
• Why can't I automatically or easily link to Zohosheet, Zohowriter or Zohocreator? Or to even things like EditGrid or Gliffy?
  
• Why do I have the option only to upload? Why not a url for a document instead of a file off my local drive?
  

Hopefully planning my work a bit better will help me keep up with my blogging as well...