When you talk about the sorts of internal collaboration activities that companies of any size need to support, those related to product development should be right up near the top of the list.
That’s why your organization might want to take a peek at a platform called OneDesk, a cloud-based application that is explicitly intended too coordinate product managers, engineers, marketing teams and even customer support professionals.
I spoke a few weeks back with Catherine Constantinides, one of the OneDesk team members, a few weeks back about how the platform might be used and the sorts of features that are included.
She describes it as a place for companies to declare and manage all the “needs requirements” associated with a given product or product development project.
Internally speaking, there are places to share ideas for the next releases, which can bubble up from anywhere. As some of these ideas are embraced for future features, the team can track the progress as well as any challenges or objections that might occurs along the way.
From an external perspective, OneDesk can be used to monitor and gather feedback about a product that is emerging in social media or social networks.
Ultimately, the main benefit is that all feedback — whether it is internal or external — can be gathered and searched from one location. “You can see all of the requirements, feedback and tasks associated with a particular product release,” Constantinides said. Then again, you can turn off any particular module that isn’t relevant to your organization.
There are two flavors of OneDesk, one that is free, which supports up to 30 people within a company (which is great if you are small small business) and that comes with up to 100 megabytes of data storage. OneDesk Pro will cost your organization $30 per user, per month. That essentially pays for the much larger storage capacity each users gets, up to 1 gigabyte per person.
For midsize businesses that need to worry about such things, OneDesk just released an application programming interface (API) that enables its application to be integrated with enterprise resource planning and CRM applications including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com and NetSuite (they aren’t the only applications supported, but are among the most relevant, of course).
