In order to plan your next business project, you’ll probably need to consider a project management suite. I once mentioned that I worked with OpenProj with excellent results.

Now I received a mail with an invitation to use ProjectOffice.

This is also a free project suite that can be access online in a secure way by all your team members.

ProjectOffice.net is a web based online project management solution that besides basic project management functionality offers collaboration features to its users.
With ProjectOffice.net individuals and teams can create projects and tasks, can assign tasks to project members, can track time, expenses and issues and can use wikis to boost collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Some of the nice thinks I can mention about projectOffice are:

The graphic design: It’s really easy to use and intuitive for any user.
The dashboard: You can get all the project information from this place. And it’s really easy to find everything.
Wiki: projectOffice includes a Wiki concept for all the existing project so everyone can add information, depending of course on each member profile.

Really, a terrific tool!

Creating Mind Maps online was never so easy as today. I already mentioned FreeMind, an online tool to create this kind of diagrams.

I recently discovered Exploratree, another MindMap diagram drawing tool that has many other diagram templates and with lot of further functionality.

These diagrams can support independent and group research projects with frameworks for thinking, planning and enquiry. All of the guides are completely customizable or you can start from scratch and make your own! You can share them and work on them in groups too.

Even Exploratree is in beta release, it’s really very complete and easy to use.

Are you looking for a good 3D-design software for your e-business? Maybe you already consider 3D Max or Maya.I just want to introduce you Blender, an excellent open source design application for your 3D modeling needs. It’s fast, it’s free and you can download this complete 8MB application from Blenders website.

With Blender you can create and apply textures, animate, render and also include audio effects in your projects.

In Blender’s website you can find tons of material, examples and also a 400 pages book with the official users guide.

If you are looking for a web conference software for your business, Dimdim has a very good product.

Dimdim is the Open Source web conferencing company. With Dimdim you can show Presentations, Applications and Desktops to any other person over the internet. You can chat, show your webcam and talk with others in the meeting. It’s really very easy to use and requires the flash plugin available in your browser.

You can also think on using Dimdim for elearning purposes or even for perform sales with potential customers. Excellent piece of software!

Have you ever used VISIO? This is excellent software (acquired by Microsoft) that lets you draw diagrams and charts easily.

I just found a great tool to replace VISIO’s functionality that let you create professional diagrams online, with only a computer connected to the internet.

From DrawAnywhere website you can generate excellent diagrams online and export them in many common formats. Great tool to use when modeling your business!.

Rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.

This is a great tool for your next ebusiness project!. And it’s totally free! No login required.

How many times did you need the logo of partners or customers in curves format? The first step you’ll probably do is go to their websites and try to download the company logo; this could not be a good material if you plan to print the logo in a sign or a big format.

In order to help you with this job, there’s a very interesting website from where you can download the most know logos in illustrator format for printing and professional. You can also add your logos or the ones you have in this particular format in order to help other people with the same subject.

All Free Logo, the website’s name, has a interesting design and more important, a very useful content. Ideal for any designer.

Have you ever wanted to write down a mind mapping for your business? I use to do it not only for the business I work for, but also for the classes I teach at the university.

Free Mind is a terrific tool for doing this. You can easily draw your mind maps and export them to HTML (in order to present them online), PDF and other well known formats.

Free Mind is written in Java and can be installed in both Windows and Linux. Great tool!.

When planning your ebusiness, you’ll probably look for a special font for your project. In this case, Fontica is a wonderful resource that provides a gallery with almost 7000 free fonts that can be previewed and downloaded after a simple registration.

It also has exchange fonts that you can get using credits. In order to get credits, you have to upload your own fonts, son the site continuously increase their fonts number that’s to their users.

Last, but not least important, it has a tool section from where you can download font administrators for your computer, or a tool to create new fonts, or even a font converter from Mac to Windows.

It’s really a very useful site with useful resources!.

Planning an online business? I use to advise my friends and customers concerning this great “adventure”.

Many times they introduce me to their terrific projects and, when defining their online strategy, they fail in some little usability things.

Even I use to tell what I think and criticize these issues, many times my advices are not implemented because they suppose their original idea is great.

I recently find this article in Smashing Magazine that resumes the common usability issues I criticize when I find them in the project I received: 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of

It presents the most common usability nightmares everyone should avoid when designing functional and usable web sites. Please, take a carefully look and know how I think!.

Source: Smash Magazine