Recently a client asked: “I am trying to understand a real world workflow for the project blog facility. Would this feature be used to manage a blog dialogue within Solve360? Is it to feed into other sites which have a blog like Wordpress? … This would help me understand how to work this feature into my company.”

A project blog in Solve360 describes a web page that tells a story about something your team is working on. A private diary/agenda/folder for a business transaction or project, if you will. Most of the time a project blog will remain private, used internally by your team, however publishing a project blog to an external guest user opens up a whole new world, enabling you expose a specific view of your internal activity with your customers.

A common way to view a project blog is as a “war room” where a specific project’s plans and activities are coordinated. Many companies have multiple projects going on and project blogs are an easy way to organize each one on a single page while still being able to relate the project to other items, track next actions, schedules, search, etc. Our blogs are different than those popularized for distributing news, most of our focus is on using special entries such as notes, task-lists, files, photo-lists, events, websites and linked emails to “tell the story”. As the story evolves content is updated, items are moved around the page for context and relevance and comments are made inline not at the end of the page.

Here are a few examples to illustrate some common scenarios of how the project blog's publishing feature can be used:

COMMERCIAL REALTOR publishes a project blog marketing a large property and its related business case to a select set of clients

DESIGN COMPANY publishes a project blog to a customer to document the progressive feedback on each design iteration

BIGCO publishes project blogs to its external contractors to document assignments and correlate job history to work orders

FINANCIAL PLANNER publishes a project blog to a client to document the annual plan they agreed to

HOME BUILDER publishes a project blog to share the mutual plans/schedule of a specific home with its buyer and get feedback on issues as they occur

HOSPITALITY publishes a project blog to an event coordinator to inventory the services needed and manage issues as they come up

LAWYER publishes a project blog to an external consultant to share the plan and related assets pertaining to a specific case/docket

RECRUITER publishes a project blog to a client listing requirements, potential candidates and document the feedback through the selection process

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER publishes a project blog to a client to get feedback on the program specification and testing results

“Invited Guests” are assigned Read-only, Modify, or Comment-only access to a specific project blog. Comment-only allows Guests users to add comments to each of the activities on the page, but not change the page content.

The customer eloquently summarizes “So a project blog acts as a self-contained thread pertaining to a subject, keeping the correspondence separate from email and easy to view.” Yep!

1Jason Koeppe

Do you find that clients tend to create a blog per project? Or is it more granular than that? I’m thinking of our web development/social network deployments. We would need an internal blog for collaboration privately and a public blog for the clients to interact with us with. Is that common or is there a better way? The other way I considered was using the thread/activity view for a client as the internal stuff and then putting the project specific stuff on the project blog…however what if a client has more than one project with you and also how would you set up tasks for vendors?

Jason

2Steve Ireland

Hi Jason, It’s more common for clients to use a single blog per project, but we’ve seen many cases where using multiple blogs per project was necessary to break down the views/processes as you mentioned. Blogs and contacts can be arbitrarily “related-to” other blogs and contacts which makes fairly easy to manage these cases.

Think of a blog as a simple whiteboard or sheet of paper. What is it’s purpose, who should see it, what information / story do you want to manage, how will it be used / evolve?

Tasks are currently assigned to users, we are looking to expand this to assigning tasks any user or contact.