Budget 09 (New Zealand)

Team Effect, for those who weren't aware, is based in the clean green isles of New Zealandand our government yesterday released the national budget for 2009.  For many it will come as quite a shock.

Predictions of up to 220,000 people out of work within the next year.  Two hundred thousand people!!  (For our overseas audience, that's 5% of the population of NZ.) Two hundred thousand frustrated, bored people sitting at home getting despondent about how their CV was rejected by yet another job application.

That sux!  That really sux! 

I have been lucky enough to have very few CV rejections over my career but each one of them cut me deep. It's humiliating and terrifying to be shot down again and again and again.  To anyone out there who has applied for more than a dozen jobs in a row and received that woeful "Dear John, Thanks for your CV, but sorry ...” letter, my hat is off to you.  You are truly brave and courageous for your perseverance regardless.

"We are seeing around New Zealand ...  people showing a great deal of resilience.  No one likes this recession, but they're rolling up their sleeves, they're doing what they need to do, to get through it."

Bill English, 29 May 2009, Interview on Campbell Live

That got me thinking about things.  I definitely consider myself to be one of the sleeve rollers, but what can I do?  I'm just one guy - what sort of impact can one person have in the face of something as big as this "credit crunch"?

....

Meanwhile I am checking my email and coincidentally I'vejust been followed by on Twitter by Claire Sawyers of DonateNZ.  Who is this Claire Sawyers, and what is she doing following me?  Wasn't she the one in Lost with the baby that we haven't seen since Episode 2? 

Nup.  Wrong Claire! 

I do a little reputation searching using Yasni and it turns out that ClaireSawyers is the founder of http://www.donatenz.com, an awesome organisation busy channelling this national sleeve rolling effort that Bill English is yakking on about to John Campbell on the news.  "Donate NZ provides the ultimate simple portal where individuals, organisations and companies can donate goods, time and discounts to schools, early childhood and not-for-profit organisations in New Zealand."

Super simple and super smart.  Wow, cool, I like it!

I tell you, it's the Claires of this world that are going to be the difference between this depression (I prefer to call a spade a spade) being a lot less unpleasant all around than the Great one in 1930 that really seriously bummed everyone out.  So I fully support what she's doing but again I ask, what can I do?

Decision time.

Decision: I'm going to do whatever is in my power. 

..and it is well within my power to provide Team Effect gratis to the kinds of organisations that Claire Sawyers is helping.  After all, apart from the thousands of hours of weekends and evenings, and most of my blonde hair that is now grey; Team Effect doesn't "cost" us anything to give to community supporting charity organisations - it is just electrons in the wire at the end of the day.

Will this help?  To be honest I don't know.  The macro-economist in me believes that it might help streamline fundraising projects at the orphanage, or that maybe it will smooth out the childhood education planning at some Kindergarten in South Auckland, or perhaps it will help the Salvation Army with their amazing and worthy efforts.  I really, really hope so!!  If using Team Effect helps those guys get more done and stretch their resources further then my one little thing could make a whole huge bit of difference and that would be awesome!

So that's what we're doing here at Team Effect - we are rolling up our sleeves and getting on with making our collaborative project management app better so that it will make a real difference where it counts.

Ka kite ano

Jason Glover  (CTO & Co-Founder)

&

Joel Macfarlane (CEO & Other Co-Founder)

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Any non-profit organisation wanting to use Team Effect to better manage their precious time and resources should send an email to ForTheGreaterGood@teameffect.com when they sign-up.  Please include your Team Effect unique URL in your email and also a URL to your organisation’s website so we can vouch for you.  To prevent fraud, your sign-upemail address should match the domain name of your website (e.g.caroline@plunket.org.nz if you are signing up www.plunket.org.nz).  We would appreciate, but do NOT require, some online recognition for our efforts as it will help us reduce our marketing costs.

Stop... Collaborate and listen,

Team Effect is back with a brand new invention...

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned some exciting new collaborative features we were working on. Well we have put the finishing touches on those funky new features  so I thought I would jump online and tell you what's in the upgrade.

Messages and Files

The center piece of our new release is the new notes tab. Despite its humble name this tab gives you and your team the ability to run complex project discussions. You can upload files, comment as you would in a blog and as you would expect it all happens quickly with no page loads getting in your way.

Project-related messages and files on the new Project Notes tab.

A Screenshot doesn't do it justice at all. You really need to jump on in and try this functionality for yourself.  Posting messages and uploading files is snappy, fresh and fast. Uploading files is slick, even when uploading several files at once.  Right from the outset we wanted to enable uploading of multiple files at once because real projects often have dozens of files and this is what we have done.

Dashboard Chatter Feed

All this new dialogue you're going to create has the potential to quickly devolve into information overload so we've put an "update stream" on the Dashboard so you can keep track of the updates to all your projects, tasks and actions all from one central place.

Dashboard showing the new Comments and Messages steam.

No RSS feed yet, but that is coming very soon - along with a vast range of other exciting developments.

So stay tuned! 

With a change in the weather comes a change in the beer my palette prefers.  With the autumn leaves falling and the first frosts I'm looking forward to my first brew inspired by Theakston's Old Peculiar.  It's already got a whif that could put hair on your chest.

Awe inspiring!

Another awe inspiring change in the air is the next release of Team Effect.  We have responded to persistent customer requests for collaboration features in this next release by adding the ability to leave messages for your project team and attach files to your projects.  

Did I just hear some of you gasp "at last!"?  ;)

We are currently in the last phases of testing this new functionality and we're pretty excited about it.  Also pretty darn exciting are the changes to the application navigation.  

Although possibly not as sexy as the collaborative features, we've responded to customer complaints about the navigation by grouping all the functionality that works for a specific project and made it into tabs.