ReadWriteWeb

Liquid Planner, the online project manager we first profiled last year while it was in beta, has just released a new feature called Project Portals.

Similar to the project edition recently released by PBworks, these Portals allows for secure access to selected projects for clients and stakeholders. In addition to viewing progress on an undertaking, portal members can comment and collaborate on a project.

PBworks (which recently changed its name from PBwiki) has announced a new option for those seeking a hosted collaborative workspace, Project Edition.

On top of the basic free wiki, PBworks will now have five specialized products available. The enhanced project management features of the latest edition is just one reason why PBwork's revamped offerings are making headway in the enterprise.

In addition to the collaborative workspaces (i.e. souped-up WYSIWYG wiki pages) you're likely to be familiar with, Project Edition adds traditional project management features like tasks and milestones. Workspaces can also be linked together in Networks, allowing easier compartmentalization and coordination on a per-project basis.

Why didn't we think of this? Project management startup Smartsheet released a new core feature this week - integration of Amazon's outsourcing service Mechanical Turk. The Smartsheet interface will now let you set up Turk research jobs that thousands of anonymous workers around the world will split up and perform quickly for a very low price.

In the example the company provides on its product page, the user publishes a series of small work orders for research on the names and profiles of top CEOs around the country. That kind of drudgery would take hours to perform, but with Mechanical Turk it can be done on the cheap, quickly.

We've written quite a lot about project management and collaboration tools in the past but recently we came across a tool that takes the collaboration process to the next level. ProjectThingy is project management software that can be seamlessly integrated into your site giving your team and clients a familiar project environment and full collaboration capabilities.

While we love Basecamp and use it daily here at ReadWriteWeb, the idea of embedding this type of software into a page using only a few lines of code is appealing. Easy to use, you just point to the domain you want it to live on, create a username, password and voila - ProjectThingy spits out the code for you to cut and paste to your site.

The new surge in Enterprise 2.0 technologies is giving companies, especially small-to-medium sized businesses, more alternatives when it comes to company intranet portals for team collaboration and project management. In fact, it has taken those portals, once only available behind the firewall, and put them online as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. One such SaaS portal for information sharing among company employees launches today at DEMO08: Qtask, a project-centric collaboration environment.

Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing trend that takes the concepts and tools of social media (social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, etc.) and re-purposes them for business use, wrapping them up into applications that make the tools at work seem more like the tools we use in our day-to-day lives. While these enterprise 2.0 apps give us that web 2.0 feel, it's rarer to see actual Web 2.0 services like Facebook or Twitter used by businesses. And although we've seen many people promoting the business use of Twitter, we had not yet heard about anyone actually going so far as to integrate Twitter into a non-consumer focused application. However, that's just what Joint Contact has done. Their PM tool now shows how tweeting can actually be a productive activity.

DreamFactory's suite of Enterprise 2.0 applications consists of a Project Management module, a Time and Expense Module, a Document Manager, and a Team Calendar. (See our coverage of their launch here). Originally, the company was available on Amazon Web Services, but it looks like they aren't interested in being tied to just one platform. As of today, DreamFactory's software will be available on Intuit's QuickBase platform, which makes it the fourth platform for DreamFactory's suite.

A company called DreamFactory based in Mountain View, CA has just launched a new Enterprise 2.0 suite of applications called the "DreamTeam Suite." The suite's social element, which consists of online collaboration between team members, gives the suite its "Enterprise 2.0" flair, a term that loosely applies to any business-ready application integrating concepts from the Web 2.0 world. The DreamTeam Suite also joins other business applications in choosing Amazon's cloud infrastructure for their hosting needs, and then passes the money they've saved by doing so back to their customers.

Last month we featured online project management software from LiquidPlanner, but if that wasn't for you then you may be interested in an alternative SaaS from a company called Clarizen. The Clarizen project management software came out of stealth mode last year and has now just launched a new version with additional features. The latest version, Clarizen v 2.0, will be demoed at tomorrow's "Under the Radar Conference," an event held on Microsoft's campus whose current theme is "The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work."

Add this one to your web office toolkit - LiquidPlanner is an online, hosted project management tool that lets you access and update projects anywhere you have an internet connection. The service offers you and your team a complete project environment, social networking and collaboration features, and a probabilistic scheduling engine which tells you the probability of completing each task - and ultimately the entire project – by a certain date. With everything organized into a centralized dashboard that can be customized for each team member, everyone on your team can stay focused on their tasks and how they relate to the project as a whole.