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As the company's founder and CEO Ilan Abehassera told us earlier today, Producteev wants to be a "multichannel group productivity application" that goes far beyond simple task management for groups. The most interesting new feature Producteev launched today is the ability to "crowdsource tasks." This features allows users to make some of their tasks public and publish them to their Twitter or Facebook feeds. These messages will then include a shortened link back to Producteev, where your friends, colleagues, and random followers can provide you with answers or ideas (after identifying themselves through Facebook Connect or Twitter Connect). Basically, this feature allows you to manage all the answers you would usually get as @replies on Twitter, for example.

FriendFeed for Productivity Apps

Producteev also offers what it calls a "FriendFeed for your productivity apps." The service can aggregate the activity from team members on Zoho, Google Reader, Docstoc, GitHub, SlideShare, and others. The company will continue to add support for other services, including Google Docs, in the near future. If a team member uploads a new document to Zoho, for example, a notification will appear in the other team members' Producteev real-time live feed, which is available on the site and in the mobile and desktop apps. This feed was clearly modeled after the Facebook news feed - down to the notifications icon in the bottom right corner of the window. Just like in FriendFeed and Facebook, users can 'like' status updates and comment on them.

In addition, of course, Producteev also offers all the standard task management features one would expect from a modern task management applicaiton, including the ability to delegate tasks to other team members. Users can also upload files and Producteev offers a basic revision system for these files as well. Another nice feature is that users can add new tasks by sending a DM to Producteev's Twitter account or by sending an email to Producteev.

These social features also set Producteev apart from some if its competitors, including Basecamp. It is also important to note that Producteev offers apps for a wide range of mobile phones, including the iPhone (iTunes link), Android, Windows Mobile, and Nokia S60 phones. In addition, there is also a cross-platform Adobe Air app and a Blackberry client will be released within the next couple of days.

Pricing

Producteev offers 7 different account types, ranging from free trial accounts with three users and 10MB of storage ($5/month after the free trial) all the way up to the Gold business account ($99/month) for up to 100 users and 1GB of storage. There are three different tiers of business accounts (Bronze, Silver, Gold), all of which feature customizable dashboards, sync with Outlook and iCal, as well as priority support by email.

There is also a free account for students, with support for up to 40 users. According to Ilan Abehassera, Producteev's founder and CEO, the educational market is clearly on the company's radar and Producteev is working on a number of deals that would provide a white-label version of its service to universities and colleges.

Get a Free Gold Account

Producteev gave us 10 Gold accounts ($99/month) to give away to our readers. These will be valid for one year. If you want one, leave us a comment below within the next 24 hours and explain how you would use this application for personal or business use. We will pick the 10 most interesting comments and Producteev will set you up with a Gold account.

Qtask Overview

Like SharePoint, Qtask offers a number of features for team collaboration including discussion boards, wikis, file sharing, form creation tools, RSS, calendaring, and full contextual search. With its comprehensive tool set, projects can be created, managed, maintained, and tracked. Because all the information relating to various tasks is online, new team members can get up-to-date quickly on the status of various projects just by signing into Qtask.

Getting Started

When you first sign into Qtask, you're presented with a global dashboard from which you can see an overview of all the most important items, including tasks and their status, meetings you've been invited to and those you're scheduled to attend, recently updated wikis and files, your schedule, team members and other important top-level items. The layout of these items is similar to that of iGoogle and its widgets, which makes it easy to see at a glance everything that you need to focus on.

Global Dashboard

At the top of this dashboard is navigation that can take you deeper into the site - to discussion boards, team calendars, project homepages, and more. Like the global dashboard, each project's homepage focuses on just the key items (meetings, tasks, files, etc.) for that specific project.

It's All In The Details

Although there are many portals for team collaboration like this available today, it's the little details in Qtask that make it worth a look. For example, in the discussion threads, discussions can be set to public or private, unread items appear in a different color, and you can flag items as "hot" to draw attention to them. Team calendars feature thumbnails of the members faces and discussion areas where members can work out details, discuss agendas, etc.

Editing the Meeting Deatails

Other great features include version control for uploaded files and syndication (via RSS) of file shares and wikis - and both of which can even be shared with those outside the company. A site-wide search box lets you perform searches and also offers a number of advanced options to help you find just what you need:

Other Features

Built-in tools for form creation are also included with Qtask as is a mail feature which can be used for internal communications. Outside email like that from Gmail or Yahoo can be integrated with Qtask via IMAP support.

However, one of the most useful features in Qtask is its ability to track changes. File history can be tracked as to who uploaded, downloaded, or accessed a file and when. Tasks, meetings, wikis, and discussions can be tracked as well. This feature has made Qtask so popular with lawyers, that the company will soon be releasing a customized version just for them. (Out of Qtask's initial crop of 2000 users, many are lawyers).

Keeping Track of Changes

Finally, Qtask is available via a mobile browser - a must have for today's on-the-go workforce and remote workers. Whether you use a Blackberry, iPhone, or a standard mobile of some sort, you have access to everything on the site.

On The Horizon

In addition to the upcoming version of Qtask customized for lawyers offices, the company also hopes to create more customized versions for several different types of companies, including perhaps doctors or real estate offices, as those are other popular users of their program.

They also plan to release an enterprise version later on which can be implemented on a company's own servers as an alternative to the SaaS solution they have today.

Affordable And Feature-Rich

Qtask offers plenty of features which will appeal to the SMB market looking for a project-focused web-based tool for team collaboration. The service is very affordable, too: free for 5 users for the first year and comes with 5 hours of free training. Additional users are $50/each per month. Prices include the ability to create unlimited projects, access to online training and online technical support.

At launch time, Qtask is offering a special: charter accounts will only be charged $25/year for additional users.

You can learn more about Qtask from visiting their web site, available at www.qtask.com.

Seeing as we live in the same city, last week I caught up with ActionThis CEO Ed Robinson and Chief Marketing Officer Tim Howell, to get a demo of the product and see where it's headed. As a side note, it's worth noting that ActionThis isn't the only web-based task management app in town - PlanHQ is another Wellington-based startup offering a similar product (I met both startups on the same day). However the two products tackle different niches - I'll explore PlanHQ in an upcoming post.

Crowded Market - What's the Differentiator?

ActionThis is going after a global market - and it's very crowded. 37Signals for example offers Basecamp, which tracks tasks online too. But everyone has their favorite. In August, Josh Catone wrote that his favorite is The Online CEO. You can take your pick of online To Do list products - SolutionWatch listed 25 of them last year. So what differentiates ActionThis? It actually has a very good one - it neatly integrates with Microsoft Outlook, which millions of people already use for task management. What's more, integration with Microsoft Project and Windows Mobile are coming soon.

The Microsoft Office integration is key to ActionThis' potential success. ActionThis is backed by Intergen, a local web development firm that has a close relationship with Microsoft. CEO Ed Robinson comes from Intergen and also worked for 6 years at Microsoft in Redmond, as a program manager. So ActionThis is playing to its strengths and has created an online task management product that can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook, potentially tapping into a huge user base. In the demo I saw, creating a new task within Outlook was as easy as creating an email - and there are tracking features in ActionThis that are missing in Outlook's native task feature. See screenshots below.

ActionThis task in Outlook

Attaching ActionThis items to an email in Outlook

Special Offer for R/WW Readers

ActionThis is currently being offered as both a free and premium version. The free version is web-only for single users. The premium (subscription) versions of ActionThis start at US$10 per user per month - and basically for that you get the Microsoft integration.

There is a 30 day free trial for the premium version. However ActionThis is offering 1,000 R/WW readers a free ActionThis license for 12 months. To take up this offer, click here and enter the following code: RWW1007. This promotion is only available to first time subscribers to ActionThis and it will end when 1,000 people have signed up using the unique code published here.

Conclusion

ActionThis is essentially two separate products: the web-based version and the one integrated into Outlook. In our meeting Ed Robinson described this as following the "good, better, best" concept, where the Web version is 'good' and the Outlook one 'better' (as it offers more functionality). The 'best' will come when ActionThis adds Microsoft Project integration in the near future (1-2 months time).

I also asked how ActionThis in Outlook differed from Outlook's native task management feature. Ed replied that Outlook native tasks are limited to "peer to peer" interactions within groups, whereas ActionThis offers a central overview and additional features.

ActionThis is marketing itself as a web-based product, but it's also tapping into Microsoft's marketing of the "software as a service" concept. Microsoft hasn't yet built web-based functionality into Outlook tasks, at least not as well as ActionThis, so this small Wellington startup is banking on Microsoft users all over the world signing up to its 'value add' service. Of course the risk is that Microsoft evetually releases similar functionality itself, but until then it's a potentially lucrative market for ActionThis - provided they can convince users that the added benefits are worth paying for.