WebAsyst: A Collaborative Tool With Punch

There are a lot of online offerings out there that help you stay organized and allow you to collaborate with others. WebAsyst is a little different.

What’s under the hood?
First off, I found the interface to be very clean and intuitive. Otherwise, it would be defeating the purpose of staying organized, right? Well, at the bottom of the window you have access to all the tools: files, photos, contacts, mail, projects, issues, notes, and pages.

And you know how annoying that extra header space can get in your way on other services? Well, WebAsyst takes care of that by offering you the ability to toggle that when you’re sensitive to that sort of thing.

You can also create users, put them into groups and give everybody a certain level of access to things within your community.

Did you say “files”?
Yep. You can easily upload all types of files. As of this writing, and for the account I have, there’s about 17 MB of space to store more. I can’t tell for sure if that’s for my whole account or if that’s just for the file space. And if you need to send someone access to them, you can keep the file right where it is and send a link to it instead.

Strike a pose
Photos. Ah yes, you can store them here. But what I especially like about it is that you can drag and drop your files onto the browser to upload them instead of having to do them one by one. Furthermore, when you click on a thumbnail, you get a little “actions panel” giving you choices like adding a description, rotating the image, changing the title, emailing it to someone, or copying/moving it to another album.

Friends: the more the merrier
The screenshot below shows a couple of folders allowing you to categorize your contacts anyway you want them. In addition to all the pertinent details, you can add an image to their profile if you like.

This just in
I’ve seen a lot of similar tools, but I don’t recall seeing many (any?) with an email system built right into the thing. In addition to creating folders for easy storage, you can also create templates, which is pretty nifty.

It’s all about the timing
You can create an unlimited amount of projects. And something I haven’t seen very often is the ability to view projects with a Gantt chart. Create customers and reports, assign tasks, track costs and choose whether a task is billable or not.

But it has issues
And I mean that in a good way in that it has an issue tracker. I sort of see this as a to-do list, but it has many other features packed into it. For instance, you can filter the view on a number of criteria: by author, group, status, timing, those assigned to you. And did I mention reporting?

Discard your paper notes
No tool of this nature would be complete without the ability to create notes. But where WebAsyst is a little unique is its ability to print these notes in a variety of templates. So if you don’t like the pre-built ones, go ahead and create your own with a handy-dandy HTML toolbar editor.

Create books for easy access
Okay, out of all the features this baby packs, I have to say Pages is the coolest. You can create a document for online view and I don’t mean just providing a document in the usual sense. No, you can easily create pages that, when published, will become accessible via a left nav and give it all its own theme of colors. Just think of how you can offer this to clients for referencing status reports. No more missed emails or hefty files to send.