* A personal information manager that helps you set strategies
Remember when everyone had a Day-Timer organizer or something similar? We’d spend hours filling in our schedules and defining our goals and pretend that we were really organized.
Our company had us attend a time management course when we got our diaries but much of this apparent organization was fiction because there was no ongoing corporate view of our planning (or lack thereof). The organization had little or no insight into whether our hopefully newly acquired time management skills were responsible for our results or not.
Then along came PCs and we seemed to drop our diaries and turn to PC-based personal information managers (PIM) such as Microsoft Outlook. While PIMs were in many respects more flexible, they also encourage a tactical view of planning and organization. What we had stopped doing was setting goals and planning our personal strategies.
This way of working was, of course, ripe for online automation, and Performance Solutions Technology (PST, see editorial links below) recently announced the latest release of MProWeb, its browser-based coordination and collaboration management tool that addresses this opportunity.
According to Peformance Solutions, MProWeb provides “a framework of goals, roles, action plans and results to organize and focus the work effort [and] ties everything together; from the strategic plan to today’s e-mail [making] it’s easy to keep goals and their related action items in view so tasks and follow-through don’t slip through the cracks.” There’s also the ability to synchronize Microsoft Outlook to-dos and calendar events directly with MProWeb.
The latest release, MProWeb Version 3.0 adds “One click Visibility” so that managers can view each of their direct report’s tasks, follow-through, to-dos, appointments and prioritization of activity. Version 3.0 also provides performance scorecards at corporate, team or individual level and the ability to import data from any SQL database, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or Microsoft Project file.
Written in Asp.Net on top of an Microsoft SQL database MProWeb 3.0 can be either set-up to be hosted internally on a company’s Intranet or hosted on an external Web server.
Pricing for MProWeb starts at $450 for a single user license, hosted by PST for one year. MPro-Link, the middleware that resides on the hosting server, is available for purchase by companies that prefer to host on their own server. The initial purchase price for MPro-Link is $25,000. MPro-Bridge, which supports integration with outside data sources, is an additional $5,000. Annual update contracts are required beginning at year-two starting at 20% of the list price.
