Computing in The Cloud: Where To Begin?

Today on the Project_World twitter feed I couldn’t help but notice a number of people tweeting about “Planio”—a cloud based collaboration and project management tool. It’s hard to say with twitter sometimes which of those tweets may have been sponsored, but it still got my attention.

Regardless of industry, more and more companies are looking towards cloud-based solutions like this for collaboration. From sharing documents and calendars in Google to paying for a solution such as those by PPM vendor Innotas discussed here there are a wide variety of ways to take your activities to the cloud. So many in fact that a simple web search for “cloud based project management tools” turns up overwhelming results (and frankly, lots of advertisements, but few clear reviews).

Cloud-based tools can be greener—less need to print and share documents or emails—and can be easier to access for telecommuters or team members in external offices. Clients won’t have to install new software on their computers, and in an era when Internet is ubiquitous, it just seems to make sense.

The question is, how to decide what program will work for your company or project? We’d love to hear from you about successes or failures with SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. What works and what doesn’t? What factors were key in deciding what to use? Share with us in the comments or e-mail me.

Training Tip Tuesdays: Aligning Information Technology with Business Strategy & Goals

Join us for on Wednesday, November 18th at 9am for a special keynote presentation by James A. DiMarizo, CIO, Mazda North American Operations. In this presentation, DiMarizo will speak on how aligning IT with corporate goals and strategies may be the key to survival. IT teams who are good "service providers" cam be replaced with lower cost alternatives. But teams with align with the business in order to achieve the strategies and goals are valuable "partners." Alignment includes all aspects of IT from project prioritization to organizational structure. This session will cover:

• What is the culture needed to align with business
• How can the IT organization structure inhibit or help the alignment with business
• When to discuss business plans instead of projects

Rally Software Teams with Oracle to Extend Agile Development and Application Lifecycle Management

EarthTimes.org reports that Rally has teamed with Oracle deliver the Rally Connector for Oracle® JDeveloper, extending the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) functionality of Oracle Team Productivity Center to Agile development organizations. Oracle Team Productivity Center helps facilitate a productive team collaboration environment through the integration of existing ALM solutions, including Rally. is well-known for its leadership in Agile development, having won four Jolt awards for its Agile tools and with over 100,000 people downloading its Agile and Lean software tutorials. Oracle Team Productivity Center is an ALM tool for Oracle JDeveloper users. This combination of two market leading technologies for Agile ALM and Java Middleware brings a needed solution to teams leveraging Agile methods as part of their IT/SOA strategy.

Rally Software Teams with Oracle to Extend Agile Development and Application Lifecycle Management

How to Strengthen the Office of the CIO

In his two part series on GovTech.com, Andy Blumenthal discusses ways that the office of the CIO can be changed to better serve the us population and the government body. Blumenthal's discussion focuses around to identifying, describing and linking the core elements that make up and support an Office of the CIO for the purpose of demonstrating how that will lead to improved IT operations. When the CIO is properly supported, program and project management can be executed with strategic intent and alignment.

We encourage you to check out both articles in Blumenthal's series and share your thoughts with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

How to Strengthen the Office of the CIO: Part 1
To Strengthen The Office of the CIO: Part 2

Risk Management: The Pros And Cons Of Building Your Own System

Effective risk management requires that the firms establish culture, policies and procedures that are specific to their operating model. However, at its core risk management is a quantitative discipline that requires significant investment in data, systems and people. In an article written by Aleksey Matiychenko and Alexander Makeyenkov they discuss what it takes to develop internal risk management architecture.

In order to effectively develop a risk management structure, its important to have these four things ready:

1. Holding and trade level data
2. Historical pricing data for securities traded by the fund
3. Historical data for risk factors used in various analyses
4. Results of risk management analyses

To be truly reliable, the data used in risk management analysis should be housed in a relational database such as a MS SQL Server or Oracle.

For more information, please visit the original article.

Risk Management: The Pros And Cons Of Building Your Own System

5 free project management applications you must try

DigitalArtsOnline writes that, "Putting together a project plan can sometimes seem more daunting than completing the project itself. When you need to track each step of a project, along with your costs, staff, and other factors, you probably need a project management application."

Five free alternatives to using Microsoft Office Project

Gantter.com

Although Gantter.com is Web-based, it has no online collaboration features. Rather, Gantter.com is meant to be used like a standalone desktop application.

GanttProject

GanttProject is an open-source application written in Java. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, as long as the Java Virtual Machine runtime is installed on your computer. It can be launched directly from the GanttProject site; or you can download the installation file for your specific operating system and install the Java code to run as a standalone desktop program.

jxProject

JxProject is another Java application. According to its creator, Peter Hawkins, it was borne from his frustration with other software that he felt was difficult to use when dealing with resources that were part-time or located in different time zones.


OpenProj

Like GanttProject, OpenProj is an open-source project, and has the potential to be the most popular among the project management software on this list, mainly because of its compatibility with Microsoft Office Project files


Open Workbench

As its name implies, Open Workbench is yet another open-source project management program. It runs only on a Windows computer with the Java Virtual Machine Runtime installed.

Of course, for a detailed account of these free programs, be sure to check out the original post.

5 free project management applications you must try

Any others missing on the list?