When collaborating with someone or a small group of people on a project, you have four main tools for communication: in-person, e-mail, the phone, and instant messaging. Each of these has their pros and cons. For in-person to work, the collaborators, naturally, have to live within the same area. But how often does that happen?

Email is a popular way to send and receive files, notes, and such but how often does it happen where your spam filter catches someone’s email which has an attachment? Or an important email is accidentally deleted? You can always talk to your collaborator(s) on the phone but the associated costs can quickly add-up. You can always resort to instant messaging with your partners or collaborator but there’s the pain of setting up a time convenient for everyone to get online. This is only compounded when one or the other live in a different time zone or, perhaps, uses a dial-up connection.

So how can these problems be solved and, better yet, possibly for free?

That’s where Backpack comes in.

What Is Backpack?

Backpack is a free online information management tool built on AJAX and Ruby On Rails which can be used for a variety of reasons. It could be used as a daily management tool where you can organize your personal or work information, make notes or to-do lists, make plans- the possibilities are endless.

The cool thing about Backpack in regards to using it as a collaboration tool is say you’re the writer of comic book and you are working with an artist, colorist, and editor. Instead of emailing your script or notes to the other collaborators, you can just upload them to your password-protected Backpack page where only the other members of your collaboration team can view it- if they have your password, that is.

Along this same line of thinking, the artist of the collaboration team could upload his completed pages to the same password-protected Backpack page for the other team members to view and post comments on. Other possibilities include members adding their own notes to their team’s page for the others to view, posting links or email addresses pertaining to their project, adding marketing plans to the team’s page where the other team members can add their notes or idea to. Again, the possibilities are endless.

I could see Backpack also being very useful for an independent publisher. To save money, an editor of a book could set up a Backpack page which is only accessible by the book’s creative team. This would cut down on the number of phone calls made between the book’s team since most of their communication could be done using their Backpack page, and changes to the script made by either the writer or editor could be added to the page for the other team members to view. Additionally, the contact information and the book’s milestones could be posted on the Backpack page for easy review. Those are just examples off the top of my head.

Try Before You Buy

The Backpack service offers a handful of plans ranging from Free (allows 2 users and 5 pages, but no calendar, message boards, or file sharing) all the way to the $99 a month Pro package which allows 40 users, 20 GB of space for file sharing, 5000 pages, group calendar, message boards, SSL security, and a free Campfire account which is another online service (to be exact, it is a real-time group chat tool which is available for $37 a month) offered by the same company behind Backpack.

All the plans (except the Free one, obviously) offers a free 30-day trial so you can try one you think would fit your needs. There are no long-term contracts and you can cancel your account at any time. You can also upgrade accounts at any point so if you find the plan you have isn’t cutting it, you can simply upgrade.

Coming Up In Part Two

I’ll take Backpack out for a spin and give you my opinion on whether it is worth using. Till then…

Bookmark This Post:

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Trackback URI | Comments RSS