TeamLab

Freemium online collaboration service TeamLab continues to impress us with the new functionality. At this time TeamLab adds CRM-module. It's a pretty nice and easy-to-use CRM system that includes contacts, tasks, opportunities and cases. You can quickly import your contacts from CSV. For each contact you can add notes, tasks, attach files, opportunities and even link a Twitter-blog. The tasks provide email notifications, so you can create tasks for follow-up calls. In opportunities, you can plan the budget, success probability and track the stage, but there no financial reports like sales funnel. Cases section allows for example to organize different marketing events (see in one place all related tasks, contacts, documents). You can control access rights to all the records. In general, TeamLab CRM is pretty nice, and only lacks email integration. But the TeamLab developers promise to add Email-module soon as well as mobile version of the CRM system. For now the CRM module is in Beta stage and nothing is said about whether it will be paid or join the broad free functional of TeamLab.

Online collaboration service Teamlab continues to surprise us. Although recently it has finally introduced the paid edition, the main functionality remains absolutely free and not limited by the number of users. Nevertheless the Teamlab developers have enough time, funding and desire to create such new features as online document editors. Instead of integrating already existing editors, such as Google Docs or Zoho Docs, they created their own (competing) apps. The text editor and spreadsheets are already available in the free version. The presentation editor is coming soon. Of course, the functionality of these applications is far from Word, Excel and even Google Docs. They provide only the basic tools. But with most daily operations on document collaboration - they may cope. Documents created in Teamlab can be downloaded to DOC, XLS files and send to business partners. You can also upload documents in these formats and edit them online in Teamlab.

Teamlab - is a Latvian startup, launched this summer. It's a very interesting collaboration and project management solution, that takes on Basecamp. Teamlab is available as free SaaS service (almost without limitations), or (free) installable open-source system. Taking into account that Teamlab - is really well-made solution with functionality comparable to Basecamp, the question arises: why is it free? According to company representatives, Teamlab was created for own needs and they were so happy with the tool, that decided to share it with others. The company hopes to attract third-party developers to contribute to the product and gain popularity with the freemium model in order to compete with Basecamp on the global market. And then they plan to introduce paid features (with the promise that the open-source version will remain free forever).