An All New SharedStatus - Free Project Management Software

The core product for my company, SharedStatus, has undergone a pretty large overhaul that I would like to share with you. First off, what does SharedStatus do?

SharedStatus is a free online service that helps you keep get stuff done as a team. You can create a project, add team members to it and assign tasks to yourself and others. You can also share ideas through messages and comments. Most project management tools focus on features only a project manager needs, and often have lots of overkill; SharedStatus is focused on the people that actually get the work done, making it easy for everyone to update their status as they go. You can eliminate the last minute status report updates and time wasting status meetings; it’s why we call it SharedStatus.



What’s New and Improved
Here is a quick summary:

New UI - It’s clean, simple and focuses on the content. We made it highly responsive, so much so that it often feels like a local desktop application.

Labels - We added a project wide labeling system for tasks, messages and files in your project. You can apply one or more labels to anything and quickly see everything with that label using a mouse click (or finger tap).

Group Chat – Stay online with your team to discuss issues in real time. No need to fire up that IM client and get disturbed by friends and family while you are trying to get real work done.

File Storage - Got a distributed team, or even people that need to work from home occasionally? Let SharedStatus ride herd on key files, storing them in your project so everyone on the team has access.

Email Enabled - People live in email. Rather than fight that, we embrace it. If someone comments on a message or task in your project you can be notified by email. Simply reply to the notification by email and your response will be added to the thread for everyone to see.

Free Version - We wanted to remove the barriers to people using SharedStatus. Rather than give you a free trial, we are giving you a completely free option. No credit card required, no expiration. There are some limits but for a small company that needs to manage tasks between a group of up to 20 people, our Free plan may be all you need.

A Whole New Business
Not only is SharedStatus the application new, the entire business has evolved. We used to operate under the AlisonWeb Corp. banner but have now become SharedStatus LLC - making it clear that we are focused on exclusively on SharedStatus. I added a partner last year that has helped make this new product a reality: Josiah Ivey. Adding Josiah to the team has been incredible and we are both excited to see SharedStatus evolve over the coming years.

There is also of course a new web site that reflects the changes we have made and includes lots of screen shots and videos to help you get an idea of how SharedStatus works.

If you work with a team of people and want a simple, free tool for keeping your projects running smoothly please check out the new SharedStatus.

Comments

jbeardsley said…
Congrats on the release! It's definitely much improved from the original version. Well done.
David Alison said…
@jbeardsley: Thanks Jeff! We're really excited about this release. It seemed to take forever because Josiah and I both were so picky about the UI being "just right".
Chris Bulow said…
Nice looking software David; thanks, will definitely be checking that out.
Keleko said…
I'll have to check this out. It may be just right for my church's use when we need to coordinate more than just emails.
David Alison said…
@Chris: Let us know if you have any questions. Happy to help.

@Keleko: That's one of the nice parts about having the free version; it's perfect for churches, non-profits, clubs etc that need to coordinate things. Hope it works for you!
fellowweb said…
David, it looks fantastic!

Do you guys intend to provide clients to organize one's SharedStatus account on mobile devices (e.g. running iOS/Android/RIM)?

Could you consider adding a kind of "Family/NGO option" as a 5-10 USD/month extension to the Free plan? It could be structured in a way that one could have a neglectable amount of storage <1 GB (e.g. for scanned in receipts or other admin stuff) and maybe even trade the number of projects against users (e.g. 5 projects but only 5 users). It needn't be explicitly advertised in order not to risk canibalizing revenues from the more expensive plans. Does this make sense?
David Alison said…
@fellowweb: Thanks! Glad you like SharedStatus.

We are already working on optimized versions of the web site for different handheld OSs, focusing initially on iOS.

I like the idea of having variations on our current plan. This is something we'll test a little bit over time to see how it meets the market needs. As we continue to add features the plans will probably be adjusted.
slann303 said…
Hi David,

I work for a small company (8 people) in Switzerland and we started using the free version of your web app and we like it so much that we are considering to move to one of the subscription plans.

Are there any plans to localize the app to other languages like german? You might want to look into that because there simply isn't anything of this quality around in the german speaking area. Many of our business partners liked your app but they had to abandon it because there were always some people in the teams that could deal with the English.

BTW: The design of Sharedstatus is exactly how I imagine a 'perfect' version of Facebook, clean and well-thought.
slann303 said…
uhps, typo in the last comment: ....there were always some people in the teams that couldn't deal with the English.
David Alison said…
@slann303: I'm glad to hear you like SharedStatus! We're very proud of the interface and are big fans of minimalist UIs that don't try to do too many things.

Frankly we haven't given much thought to internationalization on SharedStatus because we've been consumed with our next major release. We do want multi-language support in SharedStatus and German would be one of the top (if not the top) languages to provide support for; unfortunately I can't commit to when it would be available.

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