With Podio Notifications installed, the extension’s icon will display the number of unread notifications you have – and it will update in real time.

To see the notifications, simply click the icon and the drop down will show the most recent five. You can then go to the activity you’re being notified about with one click. Once you’ve viewed notifications through the extension they will be marked as read on Podio.

Along with the notifications displayed in your browser, Chrome’s on-screen notifications will display Podio notifications in a small window outside of the browser. As long as Chrome is running, you’ll stay notified. Click the notifications when they appear to be taken to the activity on Podio – this will mark the notification as read.

Currently we’re experimenting with new ways to read and handle notifications in Podio. This extension is the very first step, and we look forward to bringing you more in the future. Don’t forget to get it from the Chrome Store, here.

How to Use Podio as a Content Marketing & Link Building Tool

Marcela De Vino, writing in Search Engine Journal, has a brilliant, indepth guide to using Podio for content marketing and linking building. If you’re in marketing, I’d really recommended this.

“With Podio I can keep track of every single project, deliverable, and task that’s involved in successful online marketing campaigns. I can keep clients involved in the process and provide them with an easy platform for reports. I can combine competitive research into actionable platform for our link builders to acquire links. And oh, so much more.

“Want to take a peek at how Podio works? It won’t take you long to figure out the immense potential hidden in this tool…” Read full guide

Image from Search Engine Journal

Podio: The Work Platform

New iPad Magazine, Productivity Boost, features a write up of Podio in this month’s edition – alongside a great interview with bestselling author, Tim Ferris. (There’s also a thought-provoking article with Mr. GTD himself, David Allen, in a previous edition that’s a good read too.)

The team at Productivity Boost have kindly put together a special offer for Podio blog readers: You can get this and next month magazine for free – without any on-going subscription – by downloading the app, tapping Subscribe, followed by Current Subscribers and enter the promocode: “TreatYourself” (minus the quotation marks). Get app and read article

Build a Basic Intranet Using Podio and the Intranet Pack

If you’d like to setup Podio to handle your company’s basic intranet processes, Will Kelly on Tech Republic has a very detailed step-by-step guide.

“Sometimes a simple intranet is the best intranet. See how to build a code-free intranet using Citrix Podio’s Internet Pack app.

“It’s a flexible and easy to use intranet with a number of free apps to extend its features available in the Podio App Market. Such add-on Podio apps give you the freedom and flexibility to create a feature-rich intranet without the need for a programmer.” Read full guide

Podio: Custom Business Processes Done Right

Alex Tatiyants has put Podio through it’s paces on his blog, tatiyants.com, and written a helpful guide to using Podio as a CRM.

I loved reading this article and the view of Podio that Alex has. And actually, I found his whole blog really funny – which is not something I often think when reading tech-blogs.

“Every now and then I run across what I call forehead-slapping software. You know, the kind of software that makes you slap your forehead and exclaim ‘This is so simple, yet so awesome. Why didn’t I think of it first?!’

“So, how does [Podio] work in practice? Lets take the case of lead management. Suppose I want to create an app representing business opportunities (let’s call them Leads) and Sales.” Read full review and guide

Flexible Enough to Replace 3 Software Products We Were Using Every Day

Andy Keil, Head of Product at Handsome LLC, has shared the story of how and why he switched his team’s work to Podio on the peer-reviews site, trustradius.

“We switched to Podio from a mixture of Highrise (sales leads), Basecamp (project management for designers), and Asana (project management for developers). Now our entire teams works in a single platform and no one misses tasks or information. Podio is flexible for just about any application and if we come up with a new use case, we can customize the platform to accommodate it. “ Read full review

Podio iPhone App Simplifies Mobile Co-Working

Merav Savir of App Champ reviews the Podio app for iPhone.

“Podio seems like a great app for both large and small companies.

“It gives you an easier way to communicate and keep a group of people organized in one location while on the go. From creating new projects to sharing status updates, you can do it all on the go through your phone and tablet.” Read full review

Every day the three trend forecasters of Quote the Future tap into streams of culture to identify trends that will shape tomorrow’s fashion. Working with a Podio solution from the Preferred Partner BendixKiel, Quote the Future proves that the creativity of a transnational team can flourish in a digital work environment. Here’s how Podio helps them collect, curate and coordinate.

Quote the Future is a multidisciplinary creative consulting agency focusing on future trends based on a Nordic vision. Quote the Future is powered by art director Mandy Rep and trend forecaster Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen, both based in Copenhagen, and trend forecaster Floor Kuitert in Amsterdam. Sara explained the hard-to-pinpoint profession like this: “If you look hard, you can find surprising connections between things that are seemingly of totally different worlds. What we do is identify the next and new trends from many different areas, such as gastronomy, graphic design, vintage garments and art exhibitions.”

Producing an online platform that explores different trends comes with major challenges: Collecting interviews and vast amounts of visual material, curating that material in a compelling way – and finally, coordinating without being bogged down by administrative tasks. “Working with trends, you look in every imaginable place for interesting things. Collecting and making sense of so many artifacts can easily become tedious and confusing,” explained Sara. “We really needed a platform to help us achieve this without draining the creative energy.”

Here is how their Podio solution supports the three key workflows of collecting, curating and coordinating.

Collection

Pictures, videos, texts and sounds are collected from magazines, places, events and the web. The Podio app for iPhone makes it easy to document things as they happen. The setup focuses on simplicity and puts the visual elements center stage. The stream gives a sense of teamwork and progression as materials are submitted by the three collaborators. “Having the iPhone and iPad available, we can collect more material on-the-go,” noted Sara. “I really like that it is doesn’t just sit in a private folder somewhere, but is instantly shared for the whole team to see.”

Curation

Curating the sometimes-intense stream of collected material, Quote the Future relies on the easy categorization and filtering of Podio. “We need to define themes for each month, and put together interviews and imagery that reflect these,” explained Sara. “We used to organize this in folders, which made it difficult to keep track of how far along each theme was. Getting rid of folders and instead linking our content to themes, we can now group things in different ways depending on which overview is needed.” And with a simple voting mechanism, it’s easy to come to agreement on which material to include: Sorting for the most “liked” pictures gives a good starting point for theme curation.

Coordination

The coordination efforts that constitute the everyday workings of Quote the Future include delegating theme responsibilities and defining tasks, editing interviews and texts and managing outreach and network relations are all core coordination. Integrating a management tool, a task manager, a text editor and a CRM system, Sara, Mandy and Floor have a great tool for pushing Quote the Future forward. “As we are all working freelance on the side, it is really important to have goals set to push yourself and each other forward. I’ve experienced that we actually get more things done since it is clear what exactly has to be ready and when.”

Queens of convenience

Having a platform that supports creative work while keeping everything organized and everyone in the loop is no small feat. Working from different locations most of the time, Quote the Future was ready to embrace any technology that could help them overcome this obstacle. Working with Podio Preferred Partner BendixKiel to develop and customize Podio helped the team hit the ground running with the new platform. This ensured fast adoption in fewer revision rounds.

Asked to name the single best thing about Podio, Mandy replied, “Being able to work in a bus or on the couch. With the iPad, I don’t feel stuck behind a screen.” It seems convenience is king for a workforce that is becoming ever more mobile and involved in several projects at once.

Kristian Møller Jørgensen is a Podio Work Architect at the Podio Preferred Partner BendixKiel. Focusing on Podio since 2009, BendixKiel helps organizations reimagine and design management and employee workflows to unleash the value potentials of working in a more social and transparent fashion.

This event is free but places are limited, so be sure to register now with the webform below if you’d like to attend on Friday, June 7th – 12:00 to 14:00 at Golden Tulip Paulista Plaza, Alameda Santos, 85.

Here’s a list of the tools that we’ve been using at Podio and how they can help your marketing team.

Email Marketing

1. Campaign Monitor: Before we switched to Marketo, we enjoyed the way you can design beautiful emails with Campaign Monitor and see great reports with breakdowns by browser, mobile, country, etc. Given the ever-growing number of people reading emails on mobile, this is really a must-have insight. Also, A/B tests are super easy to set up, and Campaign Monitor can even optimize for a winner during a running send.

2. Marketo: Probably the most powerful and useable marketing platform at the moment. We did a custom integration with Podio that provides extremely valuable insights on key user behavior, allows in-product messages, builds behavior-based nurturing flows and enables those of us in marketing to pull certain analyses without a MySQL wizard. If you’re in the B2B market, setting up email (nurturing) campaigns and landing pages without the need for developers makes turnaround time for campaigns really fast.

3. Litmus: Of course, all your lovingly crafted emails need some testing. There are just too many different combinations of browser, email client and device to leave it up to chance. Litmus makes testing how your emails will display on those different clients and browsers really easy.

Social Media Marketing

4. HootSuite: HootSuite is probably the most advanced, business-targeted social media dashboard and management tool. It comes with a range of features across all the major social networks.

5. TweetDeck: Although acquired by Twitter, TweetDeck is still a very simple, straight-forward dashboard. You can keep track of different twitter conversations and also schedule tweets.

6. Buffer: Buffer is seriously the simplest tool for “buffering up” content and having it automatically scheduled and shared across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Their growth story is super impressive, and they have one of the best blogs around productivity-related topics.

7. Bit.ly: A classic. Use it together with Google’s or HubSpot’s URL builder to make sure you track all your campaigns properly. It would be a shame if you couldn’t tell whether your social campaigns result in traffic and conversions or not.

8. Sysomos: This tool gives an aggregated and detailed overview of what’s going on around our brand, showing us how we stack up against competitors in terms of mentions, engagement and sentiment. The UI is not up to the latest standard, but it’s relatively easy to find your way around. Back when we decided on Sysomos, their pricing was ahead of Radian6, but I’ve heard things have changed…

Insights & Analytics

9. Olark: It’s true what people say about this customer support chat tool: it’s incredibly fast to implement. It also helps us finish certain key conversion flows and, at the same time, gives us great insights on how to improve those flows.

10. Qualaroo (formerly KISSinsights): If you’re looking to know more about your visitors or users and what they’re looking for, then this tool gives you a dead-simple way to do so. Want to know what keeps them from performing your desired actions? Is it missing pricing information, alarming security signs, unclear value proposition or some lack of proof? How about just asking? You add a snippet of code to your website once, pick the questions you want to ask and wait for the answers to start rolling in.

11. Crazy Egg: Sixty minutes from decision to the first live results – that’s a fast implementation! We love the advanced insights from heat maps and scroll maps of how people interact with our website that Google Analytics cannot give us. If you’re looking to increase conversion rates, this is probably a good investment.

12. Google Analytics: It has its letdowns, but given that it’s free, it’s still an incredibly good tool. The devil is in the details when it comes to subdomain tracking, event-based conversion tracking, filters and custom variables. There’s a lot of outdated information out there on the web, so pay attention when you’re searching for some of the more complex issues.

Oh, and there is one more thing…

What do we use for campaign planning, managing our editorial calendar, tracking competitors, meeting management, team collaboration, agency collaboration and simply getting all our stuff done?

Podio.

If you read this far and you’re still getting all your work done in tedious spreadsheets, email threads and unstructured meetings, give Podio a try. It’s free for a team of five. You can also read more about how we use our own product for running marketing.

This list has grown quite a lot over the last two years, and as much as marketing is constantly changing and evolving, so are the tools.

I’d love to hear from you. What are the essential marketing tools you’re using? What are the good, the bad and the ugly?

I’ve used similar apps to these for the last couple of years to work with my team at Podio, so I thought I’d share a few tips on how to get the most out of the pack.

Campaigns app – planning, goal setting and the point of reference

Here’s where you plan out the goals and the big numbers you’re trying to hit with your campaigns. Set a project manager and team that will be working on the project, assign the budget and select the buyer personas you’re targeting. The Campaigns app is less of a workflow app and more of a place to create the main outline of your campaign, perhaps by attaching presentations and other documents. Most importantly, the campaigns you create here will be referenced by the Content Planner and Artwork Approval apps described below.

Content Planner app – structuring, tracking and approving content

The Content Planner app could be your most used app in this pack. Once you’re squared away in the Campaigns app, you can start using this app by lining up the content that will be produced for the campaign. Indicate who is in charge of its completion, who will be producing it and when it should be published.

Say your company has some news to share with your customers and followers. You need a blog post, a press release, an email send and posts for your social media channels. Typically, such a process could be managed in a spreadsheet with a slew of other documents containing the content that goes back and forth via email.

By managing the production of this content in your Content Planner app, you’ll get a great overview of the status of each part of your campaign, and your team will stay aligned with when each piece of content should be ready and published. You’ll avoid the problem of having the wrong document version and the risk of individuals not recognizing what they’re responsible for.

This app works just as well for ad hoc blog posts, social posts, etc., that may not fit into a particular campaign but should still be aligned with the publishing of other content and the workload of those making it.

Artwork Approval app – requesting graphic design work, reviewing and sign-off

If you saw the video of how Cirque du Soleil manages marketing on Podio, the concept of this app will be familiar to you. They call their app “Jobs”, but the function is similar to the Artwork Approval app. Anyone in the workspace where this app is situated can enter a request for artwork or graphic design assets and assign it to someone to work on. It could be artwork for a new brand identity or something smaller, like a simple graphic for a social media post. Either way, you can link the artwork created here to the content or campaign that it will be used in – keeping everything in context and easy to find.

But that’s just the first half of the workflow for using this app. Once your designers have got the artwork to a stage where they’d like it to be reviewed, they can attach a screenshot of the work to the app item and change the status to “Waiting for Approval”. The requester receives a notification and can review the work, approve it or provide feedback. Once the work is approved, designers can attach the high-res artwork to the item either by uploading the files directly or through any of Podio’s file sharing integrations – for example, Dropbox or ShareFile.

We showcased a workflow like this in the demo video of the Podio mobile app, so here’s a look at how it works in action:

Meeting, Webinars, Competitors, Buyer Personas apps – supporting your campaigns and helping your teams work together

Along with the three apps detailed above, there are four more apps in this pack.

The Meetings app – with integrated GoToMeeting HD video conferencing – enables you to host meetings with a structured agenda, notes and follow-up tasks. With the Webinars app, you can plan everything you need to conduct a great webinar – whether for an audience of your social media followers or your company and clients.

The Competitors app is the place to share information about your competitors’ marketing strategies and discuss them with your team. You can rank competitors based on how important they are to your business and indicate which buyer personas they are targeting that overlap with your own. Speaking of which, the Buyer Personas app gives you a template for building and sharing your buyer personas, including images and a status of whether they are currently being targeted. Building personas this way will make sure they’re always up to date and available to everyone who needs them, rather than being tucked away in a slideshow presentation.

Questions?

I hope this guide is helpful if you’re just getting started with marketing on Podio, or if you’d like to expand the way you already do so. If you have any questions or would like to share your experiences, feel free to leave me a comment below. And don’t forget, you can get the new apps free in the Podio App Market.

Chimney is a movie production company with 250+ employees in multiple countries across Europe. They have worked with movies such as the Oscar winning Searching for Sugar Man, music videos for Madonna, Rihanna and Maroon 5, and commercials for BMW and Red Bull – to name a few.

Before introducing Podio, there was no room for interactive discussions or easy sharing of knowledge between the different offices. They all worked with their own tools and mostly communicated through email, both one-to-one and in email groups.

Henric Larsson, CEO of Chimney

Henric Larsson, CEO of Chimney, found that to be a non-sustainable situation. They needed to feel like one company – where a graphics artist in Berlin could easily contact a co-worker in another country for help or feedback, and where people from different offices talk to each other more often than at the company wide conferences every other year.

During a breakfast seminar in Stockholm, held by Elvenite together with Podio, Henric explained and shared some of his experiences with Podio.

Reasons why Chimney chose Podio

• Outstanding support: Henric got answers to his support questions in minutes, not hours or days.
• An attractive, modern design and easy-to-use interface:  working with 200 creative artists Podio’s attractive interface is inspirational. Gone are the old-fashioned looking, clunky designs of older intranets.
• Adapts to their needs: the Podio App Builder makes it possible to build tools that adapts to users’ way of doing work, not the other way around.
• Native smartphone client: every piece of information at their fingertips.

How to get a head start on your Podio roll out

• Use few workspaces, preferably divided by interests: for Chimney that meant one workspace for each local office and one for each profession. This way, discussions about one office’s fire drill would not clutter up everyone else’s activity stream. And the 3D teams from different offices can focus on their work together.
• Forbid internal group emailing: all that information belongs in a context – where you can opt out of the conversation and not get CC-spammed when 20 or more people have the same question.
• Keep it personal: the social features makes official, impersonal, announcements feel distant.
• Assign ambassadors to each workspace: to keep the discussion going, ambassadors post new content continuously. There is nothing worse than to send out a question to 200 people and not get one single response. Therefore ambassadors should make sure each request, question or shout-out gets a response.

Elvenite, based in Sweden, and BendixKiel, located in Denmark, can help you implement Podio in your organisation.

Since the launch, we have heard about many different and unique use cases from all over the world. From the story of a cinematographer in Los Angeles to that of the CEO of an SEO strategy firm in Costa Rica – here are some of our favorite stories that we want to share with you.

Brian Cleary
CEO, Clonmel Chamber of Commerce
Clonmel, Ireland
The introduction of Podio Chat has moved our ability to communicate with colleagues to another level. It has moved conversations out of the lifeless medium of the inbox and into something far more immediate and interactive. We are a business that requires staff to be out of the “traditional office” for large parts of the day. Our organisation is dedicated to maximising the potential of companies in our area and enabling them to create employment. Earlier today I was meeting with the local arts festival director, and one of my colleagues noticed the meeting booking on Podio. She was able to message me through Podio Chat to get me to offer the festival director places on her training course that was relevant to what he needed. While meeting with him, we were able to use Podio Chat and determine how many places on the training course he needed, and he was able to assess the information and make a decision during our meeting. That would never have happened with us before Podio Chat was introduced.

Maggie Langley
Business Owner, OfficeHounds Virtual Assistant Services
Canterbury, UK
The best part of chat is that you can quickly get an important thought out of your head and to the right person. If that thought sparks an important discussion in private chat, you can simply paste it into the appropriate part of the Podio workspace for the rest of the team to see. Here’s one way I use it. I am helping one of my clients to launch @crowdpatch. When I need to have discussions or ask questions of the founders, I will use the workspace activity stream or the comment box related to a particular app item. That way, I know they see important messages. I prefer using chat for fleeting or private conversations such as arranging conference calls. It also makes it easy for my team to ask me private questions to clarify instructions.

Jacques Bastien
CEO/Creative Director, Boogie Graphics
New York, US
My company, Boogie Graphics, has been using Podio for the past year to communicate with our team members, remotely and internally. We use Podio for everything: from developing a pitch for a huge potential client to planning our New Year’s Eve office party. Initially, we used Skype to video chat and instant message while referring to projects and tasks on Podio. With that said, when Podio introduced its new Podio Chat, my team was ecstatic! It’s brilliant! We’re able to use Podio Chat right on our mobile devices, and the interface is instant and seamless. While we do have to use other video chatting applications at the moment, we’re eager for the release of Podio’s Video Chat feature!

William Carnahan
Cinematographer & Owner at Minuta Photography | Will Call Cinematic
Los Angeles, US
Podio Chat made my and my two partners’ lives much easier. I have two companies, both of which I have separate partners in. They both live up north in Santa Cruz, and I live in Los Angeles. The chat feature allows us to use Podio seamlessly at the same time – we are able to talk over projects and upcoming deals while we access all our info on Podio. The best part of this is the mobile app. Yesterday one of my partners was flying back from Europe. He was able to get Wi-Fi on the flight, and we started talking business from his computer to mine over Podio Chat. His flight was so long that while I had to drive to another meeting, I was able to continue the conversation on my smartphone without him feeling any delay. It’s wonderful to have another powerful tool built into the already robust Podio system. Thanks Podio! Keep up the good work!

Alex Jolley
Website Administrator, Fat Fish Media
Utah, US
By giving us as a team the ability to have real-time conversations while updating projects and deliverables (without having to pick up a phone and call/text), Podio Chat has improved our productivity and timeliness in an incredible way. If any of us have questions or concerns about a project, the new chat feature allows us to save time by directly keeping in touch on Podio. Because of the time saved, we can complete projects faster and in turn have more satisfied customers – which is what it’s all about in business.

Fabián Vargas
CEO, ZEWS
Perez Zeledón, near San José, Costa Rica
Now, instead of assigning small tasks or filling up workspaces with comments, we just chat with each other or ask quick questions that only need a short answer. And it’s better because the chat conversations are in a single place, and we can find them faster than looking for a two-week-old comment in a workspace feed. And I can have real-time conversations while waiting outside a client’s office or anywhere else! This is really a big improvement and has made our workflow even faster. Earlier there were two choices: an @mention to call someone’s attention or a task to ask for something small. Well, there were also private messages, but they weren’t that obvious. Now we just start a chat, get the reply right away, get it done and move on to the next task.

Dominique Mangiatordi
Managing Director, HomeAdvisor
Aix-en-Provence, France
Podio Chat has totally changed the way we use Podio, adding real-time interactions between us. I just started using the mobile version, and it allows me to get instant feedback on tasks or approvals, i.e., for our current recruitments. That’s a real added-value improvement.

We hope you enjoyed these stories and perhaps found another use for Podio Chat that could come in handy.

So, what is your story? How does Podio Chat fit into your scheme of things? If you would like to share your Podio Chat story, please leave a comment and tell the world about it! If you don’t have a Podio story yet, well, here’s your chance to make it – sign up for a free account and find out what Podio can do for you.

Before finding Podio, the team at Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas was using the familiar combo of documents and emails to handle job traffic. This was not without its issues.

“It was very hard to manage the jobs that I had open because there wasn’t a centralized location where we were storing all of our jobs. So I could have opened up 10 jobs in one day, and two days later I was having to go through my emails to figure out what I had opened and what was still out there and what I had to follow up on,” explained Megan Pechin, assistant marketing manager.

After moving to Podio, designers, project managers and executives can follow the progress of creative jobs on any device.

Cirque du Soleil knew there was a better way. Andy Levey, senior manager of new media and analytics, and his team found the solution in Podio.

“What attracted us to Podio was that it put everything in one place, and it was something you could fully customize,” said Andy. “It wasn’t just a project management system – it was a project management system for our needs. No two projects are the same, and it’s really cool as the project manager to build in different aspects of that in different apps on the Podio platform itself.”

Of the apps created for their marketing processes – including ones for managing large projects and tracking social media content on a calendar – the Jobs app is the main hub of activity for the team on Podio. Everyone from graphic designers to project managers to executives can request and follow the progress of creative jobs in one place and on any device.

Senior graphic designer Jason Isaac described how the increased transparency of workflows in Podio over email has enabled team leaders to get a much faster and more complete overview of projects.

“It’s allowed us visibility throughout the company with people that would not normally have the time to do it,” said Jason. “[They can see] what the artwork looks like, or we’re talking about the new creative or the program or the T-shirt give away or the different initiatives that are going on. They can see what it looks like in real time.

“Is it in the art department? Is it in the marketing department? Is it at the vendor? Which vendor is printing it? Who signed off on it? When it was signed off on?” said Jason. “They can get so granular, or they can really step back and get that bird’s-eye view of everything that’s going on.”

Following the success of Podio within the marketing department, members of the sales and PR teams have now begun working with the marketing team on Podio to manage the production of assets like presentations and trade show material: “It’s been very seamless for them, and we’ve actually began the processes of mapping out how Podio can fit their specific needs,” explained Jason. “It’s mainly connecting into the marketing department at this point in time. Talk to me in two months and I guarantee you that won’t be the case – it will be more than that.”

I hope you’ll find this example of marketing on Podio inspiring. Perhaps you’re already using Podio in your company for another function like CRM or recruiting, but you would like to get the marketing department on board, too. For that, the new Podio Marketing Management apps are a great place to start.

Also, if you’re completely new to Podio – you can sign up free today and start to “work like Cirque.”

The companies that are going to shape the next 10 years of industrial development in the world all have one thing in common: They will be using digital online tools to improve their internal processes, product development and customer relations.

From the startup-garage and mom-and-pop-shop levels to SMEs and even global giants, web-based collaboration tools are becoming the ubiquitous, obvious and powerful tool of choice. We know that this is the way we need to go, but beyond that the road is open.

There is a truly mind-boggling amount of platforms to choose from. While most offer a level of functionality that just a few years ago was reserved for large-scale enterprises, the traditional IT benchmark of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is difficult to calculate, and implementation of this new cloud-based generation of business platforms poses a host of challenges to traditional IT departments.

All too often companies end up choosing a challenge-solving system that never actually gets implemented; the original goals are eventually forgotten and the system dies a quiet death.

Based on reports from experts in the field as well as input from customers and personal experience, I have assembled a collection of rules of thumb that can be used as a guideline to enable a successful implementation of a cloud-based social enterprise platform such as Podio:

1. Stop looking for one system that can do everything you want it to. These platforms are developing rapidly, they respond very well to user feedback and some (like Podio) even have a two-week development cycle for small features and bug fixes. A new generation of cloud integration platforms (like Zapier or ItDuzzit) can fill in the gaps and set up a portfolio of several systems that can meet your needs.

2. Remember that your technology project is really a change-management project. Don’t lose track of why you are doing this in the first place: improved efficiency, increased innovation, better knowledge sharing, better customer relations, better working environment, etc. Measure those things to engender and determine success. Communicate widely and repeat the key message again and again.

3. Avoid big-bang rollouts. Implementing a system by sending thousands of users a welcome email in fire-and-forget mode and then claiming that “we now have a new intranet” is a recipe for failure.

4. Identify easy success targets. Find departments, projects, practice communities, firebrands or flagship customers that are both eager to become early adopters to reap the benefits and willing to help you learn from your mistakes in the process.

5. Spot the opinion makers. The real opinion makers in your company are not necessarily the managers. Identify the real cultural gatekeepers and involve them – you will have to face them sooner or later anyway.

6. Integrate legacy data. One of the major annoyances with new IT platforms is the fact that you have to use the old ones at the same time. Put extra effort into linking your legacy systems to the new, fancy social enterprise network and make life easier for everyone.

7. Take your own medicine. Use the system while implementing it. If you are launching a project management system, use it to manage the launch project. Show that you believe in the benefits. Don’t get caught using a competitor or the old stuff.

8. Viral implementation does not exist. Just expecting that it will distribute itself is a major mistake. You might end up with unconnected implementation islands, lone wolf users and unfulfilled promises.

9. Make it official. Management must show the way, period. And that means top management as well. Whenever someone can point at the CEO and say “But he’s having a secretary write his status updates,” you have a problem.

10. Match the culture. A system can help you implement a strategy, but it can’t change the culture on its own. Make sure that your choice of platform matches the company culture. If the purpose is to change the culture, prove the benefits again and again, and not in theory – in practical examples.

11. Avoid fashion when choosing platform. Your nephew, the CEO of a competitor and your favorite consultant might all have pet platforms, but how can you be sure that any of those are the right tool for you? Set up a few clear, strategic criteria for your choice and stick to them.

12. Establish clear codes of conduct. People need to know what is expected of them – what should be documented? What should not? How are we using the system in our company? Make it clear and make it easy.

13. Maintain, maintain, maintain. New features and versions appear like mushrooms. Support them relentlessly, even if you might run into a flurry of platform corrections. Don’t ever get left behind on an old system version. When you build custom solutions, budget with maintenance. Update spaces, users, features and plugins.

14. Be forgiving. People are people, and they make mistakes or get sidetracked. Often this is because they want to spend their time on doing a better job. Don’t chew out anybody for not using the intranet. Use positive motivation. Help them out. Fix the mistakes.

15. Hold back on the buzz. New systems mean new words, new structures of meaning. Avoid using too many new technical terms, fancy acronyms or system pet names all the time. It doesn’t prove your worth to the company; it only alienates your audience.

16. Don’t create empty spaces. Avoid building large logical structures to encompass all departments and projects. If you do this, you’ll likely end up with a huge amount of project rooms with no projects, department sites with no news, or communities with no maintainenance.

17. There are no laggards. Make sure that no employee is left behind in the transition process. Avoid stigmatizing groups or departments – use more effort to get them on board instead. Acknowledge that social shyness is not a generational issue but can affect anyone. Don’t demand that everyone adopt Millennial attitudes and practices.

18. Mobile leads to success. One of the key drivers in the current wave of social enterprise tools is increased mobility, i.e. smartphone and tablet usage of the systems. Support it, use it and enable it if possible. Don’t prevent it.

19. Get enough licenses. A typical problem that holds back company-wide adoption is lack of user seats in the purchased license, often in the beginning of an implementation project. As soon as you have made your decision on implementing the platform, get the seats you need. Don’t hesitate and start juggling single user seats or force users to request system access. It’s a real adoption inhibitor.

20. Involve your IT department. Mentioned last because it is very important and because you have been trying to avoid it so far. Don’t be scared; be bold. You know why this system you have chosen will transform the company. Your average IT department might be challenged by your project, but in the end they will benefit by being a part of the solution rather than the problem. And they might even be able to help you succeed.

New Media Crew specialize in helping organizations succeed with the implementation of modern collaboration platforms. We help our customers define the strategy, choose platforms and subsystems, manage the implementation project, any other suppliers or subcontractors, and make sure that the customer’s organization adopts the new platform and way of working.

We believe it’s vitally important to revisit the strategic reasons these implementations, and to make sure that training and project communication happens at the right time. New Media Crew aim to take the load and insecurity out of your implementation project.

Christian Schade – christian.schade@newmediacrew.com

Daniel Horn: At Phases we help our customers find the right IT tools to work smarter. We believe that Podio is one of those tools. We offer different services to our clients – initial setup of Podio, technical integrations and workshops on Podio best practices.

Moving out of Salesforce and into Podio

In December of 2012, digital publisher Visiolink decided to leave the Salesforce CRM system behind and begin the search for a common platform for the entire company. Visiolink eventually decided to go with Podio because of its simple integration with e-conomic, a Danish financial control system, and the support ticket system Zendesk. Visiolink also appreciated the customization of Podio – it could be molded to fit the needs of the company and thereby ensure a free flow of internal knowledge sharing.

Workshops for key employees

Phases visited Visiolink and did a one-day workshop to identify and  sketch out the processes that took place in the organization. Representatives from all departments were appointed as Podio ambassadors and asked to contribute knowledge about their field of work. Based on a series of interviews, Phases built a structure in Podio that could accommodate the needs of everyone.

“In our journey to create a coherent and integrated workflow, we’ve scoured through pretty much every process and procedure in the company,” explained Visiolink’s Project Manager Agnethe Løkke Madsen. “With help from Phases, we’ve focused on connecting disconnected processes, streamlining workflows and creating transparency between different teams so that knowledge is widely accessible instead of dependent on individuals.”

Two-month implementation

To make it easy to share projects and keep Visiolink’s customers up to date, Phases developed an integration that copies and synchronizes projects from an internal workspace to a workspace for customer collaboration that only contains the information that is relevant for the customer. That way, Visiolink’s customers will be able to communicate directly with project managers and developers, share files and feedback and see how the project is progressing. To help the customer service team provide faster and even better service, Phases also created a Zendesk app that pulls data from Podio into Zendesk. For time registration, Phases developed a Chrome extension giving the employees a quick and simple way to register time spent on a project directly from the browser to Podio. [Illustrated in the images below.]

“We thought getting all employees to work in Podio would be an ambitious project, but it took just two months ‒ pushed through by a will to change and an excitement about Podio,” said Madsen.

The Zendesk app developed by Phases displays data from Podio CRM apps in Zendesk.

The Chrome extension developed by Phases enables Visiolink employees to complete time sheets directly from their browsers. These time sheets go into an app on Podio.

Visiolink uses Podio for:

Intranet, Project management, Project development, Bug reporting, Marketing, CRM, Time registration.

About Visiolink

Visiolink is a Danish company of 49 employees with headquarters in Aarhus. The company is the market leader within digital newspaper solutions for web, smartphones and tablets. Customers include leading media houses in Scandinavia, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands – and every day 500 newspapers and magazines are published to readers on digital platforms.

About Phases

Phases is a technology-consulting firm located in Denmark and India, employing a total of 34 employees. We help our clients work smarter using the best IT tools. Phases helps small, medium-sized and large businesses around the world by concentrating on people, processes and technology.

That’s why we would like to invite you to join us at the Podio Offices at Vesterbrogade 34 in Copenhagen [map] for a Live Support Evening. You are welcome from 6pm CEST, Thursday 23rd of May. Sara and I will be available to talk through your apps, ideas, questions and help you with specific problems. Jacquelyn will host an online webinar and join in from San Francisco (10am PST). So if you’re not able to get to Copenhagen, you won’t miss out.

Sara & Jaquelyn, Podio Support Team

Please register here if you would like to join the event on site in Copenhagen.

Bring your laptop and Podio friends along (make sure to register them as well). We will provide some snacks and drinks.

Please register here if you would like to join the Online Webinar and get help from Jacquelyn or discuss with other Podio users around the world.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

/Gustav, Jacquelyn and Sara

This all changes with Podio Chat.

You can now hold one-on-one or team chats, right inside Podio. No pop-out windows, no need to log in somewhere else, no lost files, missing input or forgotten ideas. See when your co-workers are online and start a chat that will be neatly stored as part of an ongoing conversation in Podio.

Podio Chat is out now. If you’re new to Podio, find out more and sign up here – it’s free.

It’s real work in real time.

The recent launch of Live Commenting introduced deeply in-context real-time conversations to projects, sales leads – anything you manage in Podio.

Podio Chat goes a step further by bringing a complete IM experience into Podio, not only on the web but also on mobile devices with the Podio apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

With Chat comes a new way to receive notifications.

Updates about activity like new status posts, comments and edits to app items now have their own place, aptly called Notifications – the small signal icon to the left of the Chat icon.

The Chat messages page becomes the place for your conversations, combining private messages and chats into ongoing threads with individuals and groups. This makes finding important discussions and content you’ve shared much easier.

Get ready for audio, video, Podio.

This summer you and your co-workers will be the biggest blockbuster on your screen! Make decisions, solve problems and get creative with audio and video chat – enabling face-to-face collaboration right inside Podio.

You can see how we’re bringing real-time communication and collaboration together in this special preview of Video Chat:

We want our new design team member to be an experienced, fun loving, web and mobile design talent who is passionate about improving the way people work. Prepare to work with all our platforms, all corners of our product.

Through your design skills, you will help us evolve the Podio offering, and prove that effective design can make a huge difference in the value of a product. Together with other designers, product managers, and engineers, you will work to find solutions to our user’s challenges and create the necessary wireframes and final graphics to explain your suggested product changes. You will constantly play an active role in driving your vision through, getting it into the product, and reacting to users feedback.

As with previous years, 2013 is proving to be an exciting year, with plenty of tough challenges to work with. The Podio team is growing extensively and this design position is a strategic initiative to put product design even more on the agenda.

Sounds exciting? Read more and apply today. We look forward to hearing from you.

The new menu makes getting to your workspaces faster and gives you more room to view the content that’s most important: your apps, activity streams, tasks and work. Here’s a tour of the changes:

New Workspace Menu

The most noticeable design change in this update is the introduction of a new slide-in workspace menu that replaces the current menu bar you see on the left side of Podio.

In the top-left corner of Podio, you’ll see the “Go to a workspace” button. Click here and a list of your workspaces and the option to create a new one.

Pro tip: Hit “G” on your keyboard and the workspace menu will open. Start typing the name of your desired workspace and press Enter when it appears below to go to the workspace.

Updated Blue Top Bar

In the new design, the blue bar at the top of Podio has also been tidied up.

On the right side of the blue bar, you’ll find a new way of accessing your personal profile, account settings and user login. Click the small person icon and the menu will drop down.

You’ll also find your Inbox to the right of the blue bar.

More Powerful Search

Click the magnifying glass icon in the blue bar (or hit “S” on your keyboard) and you’ll find an improved predictive search feature. You’re able to search for apps, workspaces, people, app items and tasks.

The improvements to search enable you to view suggestions for what you’re looking for as you type. No longer will you need to leave the page to view the search results.

The green item creator button (previously found in the top-right corner of Podio) has been incorporated into search. As a result, before you type any criteria into the search box, you’ll see your most used apps appear – giving you one-click access to your apps without having to go to workspace first.

Pro tip: Type the name of an app into search, tab down to select it and hit Shift+Enter to go straight to creating a new item in this app.

Out now…

We really hope you love working with the new design. If you have questions, feel free to leave us a comment below.

@PedicabGuy: Austin’s chief @ArtAcevedo for @Austin_Police, sharing in the #SXSW fun on my pedicab. #PodioSXSW

@AustinIronGirl: @pedicabguy workin’ hard for his money! #sxsw #podiosxsw

@gracemo11: Took it to the streets on the @Podio pedi cab at #sxsw #podiosxsw

@anetq: Podio Pedicaps @sxsw #podiosxsw

Podio also made a splash at SXSW Interactive in the panel discussion: Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick and Dead. Podio Co-founder Jon Froda, along with panelists Cali Williams Yost, CEO and founder of Work+Life Fit Inc., Kate Lister from Global Workplace Analytics and Richard Leyland, founder of WorkSnug, explored the merits of working from anywhere. You can listen to the panel discussion here: http://bit.ly/WRqsxd. For more on flexible workstyles and what they have to offer, read the SXSW panel follow-up on the Podio blog.

Seth Helgeson: Based in Mesa, Arizona, TECHeGO was founded in 2004 as a Technology Consulting Firm. We are a team of 12, and, since the beginning, our focus has always been working with businesses online. From custom website design, development and optimization to turn around strategies and process improvements. We have helped hundreds of businesses streamline processes, improve reputations, expand to new markets and, most importantly, increase sales and customer retention.

We have worked with companies from nearly every industry vertical and web platform imaginable, spanning all programming languages. On the evening of April 9, 2011, while researching process improvements for a client, I stumbled across a little company in Copenhagen called Podio. I read through their entire site, created an account and began playing in the App Market and with the App Builder. What began as client research ended with me pulling an all-nighter so I could consolidate our entire company workflow into a simple and efficient business process!

Bottom line: I was in love. And on June 8, 2011, we became the first Podio Partner in the United States.

This post marks our two-year anniversary of discovering Podio. We are excited to be a part of their growing ecosystem and honored to take part in the Podio Partner Program. As one of the few partners in the United States that does both Podio implementations and technical integrations, we have begun an aggressive campaign to integrate Podio with as many platforms as we can. Therefore, without further delay, I present to you our first of many commercially available Podio Integrations.

Advanced Podio Webforms for Magento

The ability to create and embed a custom webform from an app is one of the many features that sets Podio apart from its competitors. However, what if you are seeking to create a more complex webform – one attached to an inventory item, capable of dependent fields, price adjustments based on field values or an image instead of a text description?

In the eCommerce platform Magento, inventory items have the ability to have custom options assigned to them. These native custom options provide an easy way to offer a selection of product variations to your customer and this is great if you are selling apparel items with variables like sex, color and size.

Adding custom options to inventory items in Magento.

What about businesses that need a lot more than just basic product options and, to top it all off, would like everything to funnel into their Podio workflow for instant processing? Normally, you’d be out of luck. That’s why we chose to develop this extension!

Example: Outside Sales Personnel

Current Process

You have an outside sales team that visits a customer’s location to sell your product. Your current sales process requires them to fill out order forms that are turned in at the close of the day. Those forms are manually entered as a sale, an invoice is generated, payment to invoice is made by the customer and the completed order is scheduled for delivery or installation. This one sale can take weeks to process, and it all relies on the customer paying their invoice on time.

Improved Process

Using Magento, you build out your entire product catalog assigning a value, image and quantity to every inventory item. With our Advanced Podio Webform Extension installed, you can now build out and replace your manual sales order form. Your sales team, now armed with a computer, tablet or smartphone, can configure each item ordered then add it to cart. Upon estimate or sales order completion, the cart automatically calculates the order total and applies tax and/or delivery costs (if required). The customer account is then created, payment is accepted on site and, upon order completion, our extension then pushes the data (Customer Info, Order Details & Custom Options) directly into a Podio App and your workflow. What once took weeks can now be completed in just one day. Everyone in the organization is notified of the sale, and managers are thrilled to see real-time data for their staff in the field. Here’s a look at how it works:

The list of processes that can be streamlined using our extension is huge; however, we wanted to share a select handful:

• Any outside sales teams
• Project estimating i.e. construction
• Material purchasing i.e. interior decorators
• Product registration form i.e. extended warranties
• Product sales questionnaires i.e. market research
• Subscription forms i.e. event management

Take a moment to review some of the custom processes we have built out as working examples:

• Law firm questionnaire
• Landscape sales quote
• Custom blinds sales quote

If you decide this extension is something that can benefit your organization or would simply like to learn more about it, please visit our dedicated product page: http://bit.ly/10jaWH9

But there’s no doubt that sometimes old items can become irrelevant, for example with a shift in strategy or business model. Or, when importing large amounts of data via Excel it’s possible to get unwanted duplications. For these reasons – and I’m sure you have your own to add as well – we’ve created the new Bulk Delete option that enables you to clear out as many items as you want, all in one go.

You’ll find the option to Bulk Delete items in all your apps now when you’re using Table Layout. Here are the steps to follow to delete multiple items at once:

1. In Table Layout,  when you mouse over the item list number (found to the left of every item) you’ll see a checkbox.

2. Mark the items you want to permanently get rid of (and I mean get rid of – these items are not recoverable).

3. Click the small trash can icon, located above the list of items to the right.

We hope Bulk Delete will help save you a lot of time when you want to delete items and also give you a cleaner, better experience when working with your Podio apps.

WARNING: Be careful, this is deletion and not archiving. When you delete items they are not recoverable. Light Users in your workspace are not able to delete items unless they created the items themselves. In some cases it may be better to add a category to your app (you could call it Archive) and use filters in order to not see old items, rather than deleting them forever.

TextMagic is a busy and expanding mobile marketing company. We develop and market internet-based SMS communication solutions for businesses, agencies and developers.

Due to increasing workloads it recently became clear that we needed an all-in-one solution to manage daily operations in our company. We needed a tool for a digital co-working space where we could share our ideas and generate communal feedback, and a means of overseeing inter-departmental projects. We also required a system for operating and managing sales leads. A search of the web revealed a lot of buzz surrounding Podio, so we decided to give it a go…

Implementation – Putting it All on Podio

Introducing Podio has been one of the best decisions we have made and it has definitely revolutionised the way we work. Implementing Podio was relatively easy as Priit, our CEO was the first to discover the tool and saw the huge potential it had for transforming working practices at TextMagic.

Priit introduced Podio and its features to different departments and each department was responsible for setting up their own workspaces. Priit’s enthusiasm and knowledge helped us set up Podio quickly and with minimum fuss. It’s now an essential part of the way we work at TextMagic.

We believe effective communication is essential for the smooth functioning of a company and today, thanks to Podio, walls that prevent information flow from top-down, bottom-up or department-to-department in TextMagic have all disappeared.

By using Podio we have been able to establish:

• An ideas workspace for brainstorming sessions
• An intranet to share staff meetings, department directory procedures, document templates, expense vouchers, holiday schedules and more
• A lead management tool to deal with all new sales leads, associated tasks and reminders
• A marketing and sales section that deals with all related topics, statistics and ideas
• A product development tool that helps us with UX reports, features, project backlogs, releases, bugs and procedures
• A project collaboration space that deals with website updates, videos and templates
• A Twitter-like feed of everything that is happening at TextMagic
• A platform for sharing interesting online content with all team members, inviting discussion, ideas and feedback

A Podio-powered transformation

“Introducing Podio has been one of the best decisions we have made and it has definitely revolutionised the way we work.” – Triin, TextMagic

Podio has been fantastic for us at TextMagic. It lets us share ideas quickly and collectively and allows brainstorming to take place outside meetings, which has really helped encourage innovation.

From an organisational point of view it has also been hugely beneficial. It is easy to assign tasks to people across the company; all-important information is there at the start of each day, meaning you can just go to Podio to see your daily tasks. Once finished you simply mark them as done, which allows for an efficient overview of what has been complete and what’s pending.

It is also a fantastic communication tool, meaning we have to send far less emails and are able to keep on top of all communications.

Personally, my favourite aspect of Podio is the accessibility of the user interface – it is incredibly easy to utilise and has allowed us to get up and running with Podio in no time at all.

One thing is certain – now that we have experienced Podio, we won’t be going back!

Triin, TextMagic

“Podio instantly gave all users full transparency about our ongoing projects. We are now able to focus on strategic issues in our weekly meetings rather than daily business.” –– Florian Scholl, Marquardt Service GmbH, Corporate Information Systems, PM Implementation Podio

The Marquardt Headquarters, Riedheim Weilheim, Germany.

Business description

The Marquardt Group is a worldwide leading manufacturer of electromechanical and electronic switches and switch systems for vehicles, electric tools, household appliances and other industrial applications. The Schwabian family-owned company, headquartered in Rietheim-Weilheim, continues to win new markets and has established its role as a worldwide leader in innovation.

The Marquardt Group operates in all major markets around the world and has offices in 12 cities, with more than 6,000 employees. In 2012, annual turnover was more than €650 million.

The challenge

With 12 locations and a growing business, Florian Scholl, the IT department’s head of global collaboration was looking for ways to bring the world-wide team closer together and increase their performance. Being a high tech company, Marquardt IT has to manage the IT-Infrastructure of not only production sites but also engineering in several R&D facilities around the world: setting up new data centers, managing hardware and software deployments, rolling out standards worldwide, and centralising hardware purchasing for dedicated projects are only some of topics they deal with on a daily basis. Here, communication in a timely fashion is key.

Until recently, tasks and internal projects were tracked using the all too familiar tools: Excel and email. Weekly online-meetings were held to keep the distributed teams up-to-date with each other’s progress. This had worked in the past – when work was mainly performed at the head-office – but increased work-distribution and growing international teams posed new challenges that the weekly online-meetings could only partially address. In addition, time differences meant that not everybody was able to attend the weekly calls.

The solution

Marquardt needed a tool that would facilitate virtual collaboration across all locations. The tool needed to be easy to use, and highly customisable, with enterprise-level performance and availability.

Other features on the shopping list included support for major languages, personal and team task-management capabilities and ad-hoc document and file sharing. Podio was among three tools that were thoroughly evaluated over a couple of weeks by a focus group of select users. After the evaluation, users and project managers both favoured Podio over its competitors due to ease of use and customisability.

In order to ensure a successful roll-out, Marquardt decided to enroll the team from dieKollaborateure.com, the first Podio Preferred Partner in Germany. With the help of the Kollaborateure-team, custom apps that fit Marquardt’s project management needs were quickly built and implemented. These apps are now being used for all projects within dedicated workspaces and ensure the standards used by Marquardt IT. In addition to facilitating the creation and implementation of custom apps, the Kollaborateure-team also provided customised on-site and online training for all key users in the IT-department.

The Capabilities

With Podio, international collaboration was increased and deepened. Before, issues were only discussed within the weekly meetings, now they are commented on and @-mentioned without any limitation on time, since they are managed transparently among the team members within Podio. During the implementation process, users discovered the capabilities of Podio and started implementing their own workspaces for collaboration, task management and meetings. The total handling of “open-points” changed to more structured and task-driven issues. The status of different projects is now available all the time and can be commented on, discussed and edited. As usual with Podio, everybody is happy.

Jan Grau
dieKollaborateure.com
+49 173 6612307

I’m working from a cafe with Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood playing “Down From Dover” in the background. Little has changed in the past five years. The place is called Bang and Jensen, and it served as our out-of-office location in the early days of Podio. Anders Pollas and I met here to get work done, plan, design and have meetings. This was before we moved into the basement around the corner to establish our first real office. As I sit here I’m reminded of something Richard Leyland said during our recent panel discussion (slidedeck) at SxSW.  You can listen to our discussion here: http://bit.ly/WRqsxd

Working from a cafe and having to use the restroom can be a dilemma. It’s that Larry David moment when you have to make up your mind: Do you trust the person next to you to keep an eye on your laptop, or do you pack it all up and take it with you, only to return and unpack it all again, only proving to the person opposite you that you didn’t trust them in the first place? Such are the dilemmas of working from anywhere, especially in public. It’s great, it’s fun but it’s certainly not perfect. The two people next to me have been crunching away for an hour as one of them takes off his headphones and asks the other: “Hey! Let’s play office for a minute.” This apparently meant talking and planning without the use of computers for about ten minutes, followed by them getting back into the zone, executing, headphones on, working.

My co-founder Anders Pollas and I working from Bang & Jensen in 2008 before we opened the first real Podio office.

Why is the office sacred?

At SxSW we asked the audience to name three activities that require people to be in an office, at a desk, to get their work done. Here are their responses:

• To print something with ink on paper that you don’t have to pay for (ironic comment)
• Have face-to-face meetings
• Brown nosing (ironic comment)
• Accounts payable
• Access your work if you are limited by a firewall (also ironic)
• Build culture
• In manufacturing, you have to be at the factory
• If you are a manager who wants to see what is going on

The list is not comprehensive, but nevertheless it indicates that not a lot of work in the knowledge economy requires a desk in an office. In contrast, working remotely is quickly becoming beneficial in more ways than one. Kate Lister lined up some of the advantages of workshifting at our SxSW panel:

• Increased productivity (less interruptions, more flow and more flexible hours)
• Reduced employee turnover (due to greater satisfaction, engagement and loyalty)
• Reduced real-estate costs and reduced absenteeism (less stress and greater wellness)

As it turns out, people are indeed looking for flexibility. International studies show that 75% to 90% of employees want to work remotely, part of the time. A third of those people are even willing to take a pay-cut to achieve this: http://bit.ly/16Ev4sl

With this in mind, why is it that we are so protective of the idea of “the office”?

From left to right: Kate Lister, Richard Leyland, Cali Yost, Jon Froda; hosts of the ‘Your Desk Job Makes you Fat, Sick and Dead’ panel at SxSW 2013

First we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Back in the Industrial Age, a factory was probably running most efficiently when it was at full capacity throughout the entire working day. Flexible work was not possible – you wouldn’t want 50 percent of workers in the factory from 8AM until 5PM and 50 percent there from 10AM until 7PM because then you’d have 4 hours a day when you weren’t operating most efficiently. And, it goes without saying that people at this time could not work remotely.

What can we learn from the past as we move from the rigid place and time-based Industrial Age model, back to a more flexible, remote, ever-shifting way of working?

While building Podio from idea to concept and product, I’ve been surprised how little focus there seems to be on the tools that power and guide our work. There is a misconception that our work tools are value-neutral – that we manage our tools and not the other way around. The truth is, as Marshall McLuhan put it, first we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. Legacy tools for collaboration not only guide individual behaviour, they also represent a preferred way of organizing – a stifled guide to how we should organize work. Although this guidance is lost in the past, it still guides us.

Is your Brain in your Behind?

If you landed on planet Earth 60 years ago, you would think that the human behind was the most important body part. You’d observe lively kids walking, running or riding to schools all over the world, only to be seated for a full day, at a desk in a room. You would think that the behind must be the most important body part, and you would conclude that learning is about one way communication and that knowledge is absorbed by the behind, that it is all about receiving and not collaborating, being seated and not moving, confined by a classroom and not the limits of your imagination. Return 60 years forward to the present, and the picture remains the same. We sit down in the classroom, we speak when we are asked – it’s command and control, anti-collaborative and according to studies, not healthy at all. Perhaps by now you wouldn’t be surprised to see that these very principles are applied to human work life. The classroom is morphed into the office and we sit there on our behind. Our work life is a logical extension of our classroom life. Someone tells you to go into the office and sit down – our behind is still the most important body part, and it is, quite literally, killing us.

Now the tools we built to manage work are based on the same approach to learning and collaboration – that it happens sitting in an office. The tools were built to reflect and reinforce the same old hierarchy, silos, demand, control and organizational structure. In the meantime the internet emerged, based on a radically different approach to knowledge-exchange and human interaction. A distributed network that represents human relation and real value creation much better than the hierarchy of legacy tools such as classrooms and offices. The internet didn’t expect anyone to be in any particular location, in fact with wireless networks it gave us freedom from having to be in the same location in order to do things. Still the tools that enterprises adopted were built on the old model. Podio changes that. There are tools out there, like Podio, that enable people to be connected even when far apart, that stream your work as it happens, and empower each node in the network to be as productive as it can be, regardless of hierarchy. Most work tools don’t do that.

The Whip Detection Model

When building Podio, I developed the Whip Detection Model – it captures the characteristics of those legacy tools. We used the model to make sure we would never go down that road and make those same mistakes again, and that we would take full advantage of the networked model given to us by the internet pioneers, not the enterprise software makers. I outline the model below:

1. Collective: How is the group formed and who can participate?

We can’t abide by the classroom approach towards work – where the class can’t form itself and the teacher needs to intervene. We need to form groups bottom up, not top down. When groups are created by their members, there is mutual will and motivation to succeed, instead of control and force.

2. Individual: How is the individual perceived?

Tools of the past saw the employee as a statistic. This is similar to the way legacy software refers to ‘Creating a user’. In order to motivate employees in a networked model, their identity should be owned by them and not IT. I don’t walk into an office and start chopping people’s hair, but with legacy tools I can – they guided me take over your identity and change it as I deem fit. Now we know that efficient tools for collaboration should be “you first”, human, and you should own your identity.

3. Communication: What behavior is rewarded and encouraged?

Most tools of the past were based on risk and fear. You had moderation and in case of conflict you reverted to control. We now know that these mechanisms reduce sharing, collaboration and worst of all introduce a layer of control that stops innovation. Tools that enable people to work from a distance need to be transparent, with social mechanisms (dialogue) built in, in order to spark innovation and resolve conflict.

4. Process: Who decides and builds the process and workflows, and how adaptable are they?

In a distributed workforce, we need cloud based tools that work from anywhere. We also need the ability to mould them to fit our needs. Processes differ based on geo spread, and “one size” does not fit all. You should build your own tools to suit your needs, not having to wait for months. Interestingly this is one of the main drivers of the wide-spread use of spreadsheets (Excel) to run workflows and proceses all around the world, you can mould it to fit your needs in minutes.

We have grown familiar to these concepts through social networks: we own our profiles, we decide who we are connected to, we choose what we want to share, where we want to share it and how. Now that the social web has changed the way we interact with other people, stepping back into command and control tools at work seems wrong, whereas before it was just taken for granted as how it “had to be”.

What Tool?

A networked model – a distributed model works for this new era, but the old model, software modeled around our physical environment is still guiding us – it doesn’t work, and we know it. First we created it, now it creates us. For example, the library is a place for physical books, and it did its job for centuries – but it becomes a silo in the networked model. So, let’s not replicate it.

When we are not in the same place we need more transparency in our processes. Documents and email are not good for this and they are being replaced by presence tools, streaming tools that are born in the networked age because they fit its premise. We need tools that are flexible, mobile and social; real-time and hybrid to facilitate this change.

Who’s the Boss?

Cali Yost touched on a similar consequence of workshifting and flexible workstyles, namely that some of the positive social interaction and care that is part of the physical workspace won’t happen if you have the flexibility to work from anywhere. Your co-worker or manager won’t tap you on your shoulder and say: “Hey Jon, time to wrap it up and get to the gym,” or gently push you to spend some time with your children or your best friend. You’ve probably heard this before but it’s very true in this situation: with greater freedom, comes greater responsibility – flexible work puts us in charge of our work/life balance, which requires a different mindset towards being at work in the office and off work when you walk out the door. These things we have to figure out ourselves, Cali’s latest book ‘Tweak It’ has some great insights in this area.

As I mentioned in the outset, the first Podio office was really a cafe. I also did the first translation of Podio (from Danish to English) on my sailboat, at anchor in Bramsnæs Vig the most beautiful spot in Denmark, in my opinion. It was two days of concentrated work trying to strike the right tone for Podio in English, and I enjoyed it. I like the freedom and flexibility to decide when I need the office and when I don’t. Sometimes I prefer to be in close proximity to my team, while other times I require solitude. Most importantly, I like to be able to make this choice both by myself and with my team – however it suits us at a particular time.

“I get a tremendous satisfaction out of being able to solve a problem by building a Podio app” – Brian Cleary.

Clonmel Chamber is regarded as one of Ireland’s most dynamic Chambers.  We host free events to help businesses survive and thrive.  We host an annual National Enterprise Conference for small businesses.  In 2012 we switched on a free town wide wifi service that gives visitors to Clonmel high speed internet access for their smart device.  In short, our members are the backbone of the local economy. My job is to bring together services, products and people to position the town for economic growth.  The Chamber works from a 250-year-old three-storey building in the town centre overlooking the Comeragh Mountains and a number of historic buildings.

Ask any CEO of any Chamber around the world about the scope of their job and they will tell you that Chambers touch innumerable elements of local life.  Because of that we had been using many different systems and tracking methods to enable us to get our work done.  At one stage we were using ACT 2010, Excel, individual to do lists, Mailchimp, Evernote and many other services.  The problem was that there was a disconnect between those programmes and the team.  Each person used each service slightly differently.  As a result there was duplication of work and loss of time.  An optimist could have argued that it worked but it didn’t really.  Inevitably people lived in their inboxes and information was hived away in individual user accounts.

The sticking plaster solution had a financial cost and a lost opportunity cost.

Personally, nothing hurt me as much as when someone was missed out on an email.  Chambers are about inclusivity and I didn’t like it when people felt left out.  That happened when different people operated different databases or when one of the three content lists was not updated.  That is when I started searching for a new solution.

I am a sucker for those ‘I can’t live without…’ features in business magazines.  That is where I first read about Podio. Someone working in a coast to coast company in the US recommended it.  This was early 2012.  Within five minutes of clicking the link in the magazine app, I had created my first app on Podio.  It immediately made sense. That was a Saturday afternoon.  By Sunday morning I was unbearable.  I really wanted to go back to work to get my colleagues on board.  However, Monday was a downer.  They were so jaded with the systems in place they simply felt that they could not use another.  When I began to show how Podio would eventually replace everything the mood changed significantly.

Podio handles every aspect of our business…

It acts as a CRM, although I prefer to call it a member relationship management system.  Our work involves meeting hundreds of business people every month.  Everyone of these interactions is tracked in an app that we’ve built called ‘Touchpoints’.  Different things matter to different business people.  Tracking what matters enables us to see trends emerging and allows us to sort out an issue before it becomes a problem for the business community.  The Chamber Database workspace contains all the contact information of all of the businesses that we deal with.  We use the App Reference mechanism liberally to cross reference event bookings, issues, products bought, sectoral interests and more.  In a way it is our attempt to build a big data picture of local businesses.

The Chamber Intranet workspace is just that.  When we first started using Podio, staff referred to it as  ‘the annual leave machine’  because that was the only app that staff seemed to use.  Now it is so much more.  All of our non-members’ meetings are tracked here for all staff to see.  Enabling staff to access this allows a person who may have missed a meeting to stay informed and pass on any suggestions they have in the process.  It also gives all staff an understanding of everything that is being done.

We have utilised the webforms extensively on our website.  We allow members to book spaces at training events using Podio webforms.  When they do that, we use the app reference facility to track their attendance and their interest in a subject matter.

In fact this year we, as Podio users, can claim a real world first.

Podio played a part in organising the annual Chamber St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  Local groups were invited to submit their details via our website if they wanted to participate, again using Podio.  Thirty-eight groups did so and will take part in what you would call the ‘Podio Parade’ on March 17th.

The workplace that I utilise most is ‘Management’ – it tracks monthly running costs, important documents and more.  It also holds the ‘brain trust’ of the organisation.

We schedule, plan and record the minutes of all our meetings in the Meetings app we created.

I developed a board meeting app that enables me to search minutes of every board meeting the Chamber has held since the turn of the century.  The minutes can then be searched when I am researching a topic of local interest.  The major benefit of this is that the Chamber board in 2013 can see what their predecessors did.  It prevents duplication and provides significant businesses intelligence when formulating policy.

Sometimes the six Chamber staff members are spread out over three floors in this 250-year-old building.  More often we are in totally different locations.  I work from an iPad ninety per cent of the time.  Now with Clonmel’s town wide free wifi and the Podio app for  iPad I can take notes of meetings while with members in their premises.  I can assign tasks to staff and I can access documents and every piece of info that I can access just as if I were at my desk.  While I’m in Clonmel, my colleague Maggie, who is Network Manager for our social media training division, could be anywhere in Ireland inputting training evaluations and venue pictures.  Jackie, who trains companies locally, could be on a site visit to a local factory and can liaise with Sabrina in the office to set up a training course.  The words ‘I’ll get back to you’ don’t get said anymore.  It’s done there and then.

“I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of clunky tech products; you know the ones where your work has to fit around the system. Podio is different; it’s an extension of who we are and how we work” – Brian Cleary.

Podio demonstrated its value on February 21 more than any other day by facilitating a critical collaboration.

I was visiting the southeast of England with a delegation from our local council.  Jackie was working from home which overlooks a beach in County Waterford and Sabrina was in the office preparing to finish for the day.

A local employer announced 200 redundancies at 4pm.  I got a call about it just after 4pm.  I went straight to a coffee shop overlooking Charing Cross station in London and started collaborating with my colleagues.  I was hundreds of miles away in London. Jackie was in her kitchen at home and Sabrina was at her desk.  Between us we set up a training plan for those about to be made redundant.  We established a timeline to roll out free training and we decided on course content.  We did all of this on Podio, just the same as if we were in offices in the same building.

Podio appeals to the inner child in me.  I have built all of the apps we use from scratch.  I equate building the apps to adult Lego.  I get a tremendous satisfaction out of being able to solve a problem by building a Podio app.  And I love being able to get a complete picture of a business by cross referencing apps.

Throughout my working life I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of clunky tech products; you know the ones where your work has to fit around the system.  Podio is different; it’s an extension of who we are and how we work.

If you’re not already using Podio, find out how Podio can help your team work together – sign up for a free account.

Finding files

When adding files to your apps, you can choose to pick them from your local hard drive, or from a number of integrated cloud services. For these services, finding files have previously been hard, as you have had to recall exactly what folder you placed the file in to find it. We’ve now changed the search function for the popular Dropbox and Google Drive integrations, enabling you to search your entire account, regardless of file location. That way, your favourite file is just a keyword away. This works everywhere you can attach a file, including status posts in the stream, and attaching files to a task, etc.

Simply type the name of any file in your Google Drive or Dropbox to find it without searching through folders.

Clone app items

App references are very powerful when relating content to each other, and giving a better view of your workflows. Creating lots of items pointing to the same reference currently takes quite a few clicks, though. To speed that up, we added the possibility to make a copy of an existing item, keeping the references and other information, as opposed to having to type it all again. Use it to:

• Quickly list project deliverables - create the first one, link it to your project, clone and update the copies
• Create alternate versions of a press release – clone the original one, and adjust content accordingly
• Schedule a follow-up meeting – clone the previous one, attendees are kept, so just change date and you’re set
• … you get the idea.

You’ll find the Clone option at the top of each of your app items.

Delete contacts

Podio is at it’s best when you avoid sending content to your team, by bringing the team members to the content instead. That’s when collaboration becomes real. Our @-mentions are a perfect way to do that. Unfortunately your list of contacts can sometime become cluttered with users who have accidentally created two accounts, one of them not really being used. Or you may have left an organization or workspace, and no longer feel the need to be connected to all your old colleagues. To help with this, go to the contacts page, find the user, click Remove contact, and save yourself the confusion of having unused contacts in your list.

Hope all these improvements help make Podio even more useful for you.

Patrick Steil:  We love Podio… it has been a game changer for our business!  One of the reasons we love Podio is the “first class API” which has allowed us to build the PodioTools HelpDesk.  We had a great need to be able to send emails into and out of Podio.  It wasn’t a Podio feature, so we built it!  Podio’s greatest strength is that at just about every turn, it allows you to get work done the way YOUR business needs to, rather than how some developer thought you should run your business.

So who are we?  Well, my name is Patrick Steil and my wife and I are the proud owners of ChurchBuzz.  We are a team of 14 who are dedicated to helping churches produce, manage and optimize their websites and web technology in order to reach more people.  This business is three years old, but we have been in business for 18 years with our incorporated business infraNET.  We were invited to become a Podio Preferred Partner in 2011 and are excited to help churches and non-profits learn more about Podio and how powerful it can be for their organization.

In my 32 years of software development and software architecture work I have never seen anything as powerful as Podio.  Podio is a game changer!  You see, Podio does not predefine any aspect of how you should get work done.  It provides the foundation built on a “social media like” user interface (read easy to learn and use) and then gets out of the way to let you build “apps” that work the way YOU want them to.  And hey, as opportunities come up to track more data or alter your workflow, you just CHANGE it up to meet the need – instantly.  No more waiting six months for someone to find some new software or build in a custom enhancement!  Podio now powers 95% of our business.  More importantly it is allowing us to architect and build a business that can serve our clients in a very repeatable, standardized way.

Ok, so once you decide on Podio as your platform you may find that you have email based use-cases like we did.  Perhaps you need the ability to:

• accept webform submissions from your website for inquiries or tech support and want to email these users back and forth from Podio

• accept emails from users directly into Podio and want to continue the email conversation from within Podio

• need more info from a client/vendor, etc who is not a Podio user about a “project” you are managing in Podio and would like their responses to be recorded in that Podio “project”

This is why we built the PodioTools HelpDesk!

Marni Melrose is a friend and business owner at ResidualReach, LLC.  She says this about the PodioTools HelpDesk: “PodioTools helps me define workflows with people who are OUTSIDE Podio which means better communications with my leads and customers!”

Marni is a consultant to many “Daylite” software users.  Daylite is a client/server based business management system.  Once she found Podio, she designed a “Conversations” App.  In this Podio App she tracks all phone calls, emails and even Twitter conversations, this way she doesn’t have to jump from app to app to find the latest conversation. It’s all in one place.  She uses the PodioTools HelpDesk to integrate Podio with email.  For example, when users email her at info@residualreach.com – those emails are captured by PodioTools and sent to her Conversations App. She can then email with that user back and forth using PodioTools.  The client never knows the difference, but Marni has the entire conversation tracked in Podio and anyone on her team can see the conversation, interact with Marni about it or even reply back to the customer if needed.  And of course all internal communication can happen on the same Podio Item as well at the same time.

Marni uses the PodioTools HelpDesk to help her business with all of the following workflows:

• sales leads

• clients wanting to book session

• sending reminders to renew in her online learning academy

• partner communications

• outbound emails to new members

• technical support

PodioTools is helping ResidualReach do more standardized communications with her clients and partners than ever before:

“Having all our client conversations tracked with PodioTools is fantastic!  You have made my life so much better!”  – Marni Melrose, Residual Reach, LLC

Here at ChurchBuzz, we use the PodioTools HelpDesk for all of these uses cases:

• receiving leads via our website web forms in our Podio Sales Leads app

• transcripts of any website chat are emailed directly into our Sales Lead app

• we send out proposals via PodioTools from our Proposals app

• we manage the onboarding process including client communications in our Onboarding App

• once we have a new client they email us all their website change requests into our Projects app

• we take Job applications via a webform into apps specifically designed for a Job opening

This screenshots shows how both incoming and outgoing emails are displayed in Podio as comments on an app item related to the email conversations – for example a sales lead or job candidate.

In each of these cases we are able to use PodioTools HelpDesk to allow us to:

• email back and forth with the lead, client, job applicant and keep the entire conversation in the relevant Podio App.

• setup an optional Autoresponder to let clients know we received their communication which also gives them a way to reply back to our team and have that communication end up on the same Podio item.

• we use the “Email Templates” feature to pre-define canned emails that can be used to standardize our communications.

• within Email Templates you have the ability to use “macros” in your templates to plug in variables regarding the sender (ex: Dear %firstname%) but now also the ability to pull in data from the actual Podio item itself!  (ex: Your account expires on %expiration date%).

• we can setup autoresponders so that whether someone emails you or fills out a webform or even if you manually add them to a Podio app, they will get an autoresponder email

PodioTools enables you to compose email templates in Podio and add them to outgoing mail.

These features all really come together in our HR workspace.  Here is our list of Email Templates we defined in the HR workspace which allowed us to hire 3 new people in one week recently (without slowing down any other operations!)

• 1 – Candidate 1st Letter – Accepted

• 1 – Candidate 1st Letter – Rejection

• 2 – Schedule Interview

• 3 – Complete Test Exercise

• 4 – Rejection Other Candidate Chosen

• 4 – Offer Letter

• 5 – Welcome – Sign Paperwork

• 6 – Getting Started

This is powerful folks!  About four years ago I read the book “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber.  This is “required reading” for any small business owner.  In this book Michael Gerber tells you to learn what your processes are, document them and then hire folks to implement them.  Podio and PodioTools can help you achieve this “Business Nirvana” and free up more time to go to the Beach!

Podio and the PodioTools HelpDesk allows business owners and managers to implement solid, repeatable business processes to help you build a business that has value and that can run without your constant care and feeding! You can sign up for a FREE 60 Day Trial at http://www.podiotools.com

You can contact me at http://www.churchbuzz.org, and if you need some API integration for Podio that would solve problems for all Podio users, we would love to hear your ideas.

A Senior DevOps Engineer to run and scale our operations. A Senior Mobile Engineer to improve and expand our iOS and Android apps. A Senior Frontend Engineer to build a world-class user experience in our product. And a Quality Automation Engineer to design and implement test automation and infrastructure.

But what position would be right for you? To answer that question, we have built a lush 2D side-scrolling platform game that will help you find out. Click the image below to start the game.

This is a great opportunity for any developer to join a team of highly skilled developers, designers and product people, and work on a product that is changing how people work every day. Even if you are not a developer, we hope you will help us find the best possible people to build Podio, by telling any  developers you might know about the opportunities here at Podio.

Find out more about each open position and where to apply here: https://company.podio.com/jobs

You can get the new app now by simply updating your app to the latest version or by downloading it for free here.

If you’re new to Podio or haven’t yet tried out the app, here’s how it’ll help you collaborate from anywhere:

• Create a workspace to collaborate and share with a specific group of people, whether it’s a project team involving contractors and even clients, or your company department, you decide.
• Work with all the Podio apps you use to structure your team’s work. Stay updated on the progress of project deliverables, tracks sales leads, and manage hundreds of business specific processes. Build your own app at podio.com with the simple drag-n-drop App Builder and use it on your mobile instantly.
• Access and share files in your Podio workspace with integrations from every major file sharing service, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and ShareFile.
• Get all of the core of Podio at your finger tips: View and post updates in your workspaces’ social activity streams, manage your task list and calendar, and access all your contacts.

Everyday, over a third of people using the Podio mobile apps use these apps for the same or more time as Podio on the web – in the case of the remote sales team at Miinto UK, the Podio app for iPhone is used all day, everyday, to run their CRM processes.

With this in mind, making it faster than ever to get real work done on the iPhone is our priority with the new app. The new design – that you will be familiar to you if you’re using Podio on your iPad – makes it possible in new ways:

Don’t forget to update to the new app or download it from the App Store. And, you can also get started on Podio by signing up for free here. We hope you love working with the new app, and as always, please let us know what you think with a comment below.

Along with improved overall performance, another new feature is the ability to attach images to tasks.

A use case that springs to mind would be to snap a picture of a plan or brainstorm on a whiteboard and then task members of the team that couldn’t be there to review it and provide feedback.

The new version of the app also brings Dutch and Japanese language support to Podio, more on that here.

If you’re already using the app, don’t forget to update to the latest version, or you can download it for free from Google Play here. And as always, if you like it, we’d really appreciate your review of the app on Google Play, too.

In other news we’re expanding our Android team here in Copenhagen, so if you want to be part of the amazing team that puts Podio together, and you think you’ve got the skills to take the app to the next level, send me your CV – phil@podio.com

In both the Netherlands and Japan we’ve seen incredible growth in the number of people using Podio – an increase of over 500 percent in the last year! With such adaption we’ve jumped at the chance to improve the experience and make Podio available in Dutch and Japanese on the web, on the new iPhone app, iPad, and Android.

You can read the news in Dutch here [Podio is Nu Beschikbaar in het Nederlands] or read the news in Japanese here [Podioの日本語版が利用可能になりました].

If you’re new to Podio you can sign up for free here and start collaborating in your language today.

We know nothing is more critical to efficient workflows than to work with a tool that speaks your language,  just ask one of the 20 bilingual or trilingual Podio team members!  We’ve designed Podio to address this, not only through supporting multiple languages, but also in the way that you shape Podio to run projects and businesses processes the way you want to, with the Podio App Builder.

How to change your language setting in Podio

To use Podio in a different language on the web, simply click ‘My account’ in the top left corner of Podio (below your name), followed by ‘Account Settings’.  From here you can pick your language of choice.

First be sure to update to the latest version of the app you are using, the language settings of the Podio mobile apps are linked to the language settings of your phone.  So, if your iPhone is set to work in Dutch, for example, you will get the Podio mobile app in Dutch.

Collaborate with more people in more places

We hope the new language additions will make it easier for you to collaborate with your co-workers in the Netherlands and Japan, or perhaps you have partner companies or clients in these countries and now you’ll be able to work with them on Podio, too.

Jullie leiden de wereld al in het omarmen van sociale hulpmiddelen, met de hoogste rang in adoptie van sociale hulpmiddelen zoals Twitter en LinkedIn. Met de groei die wij gezien hebben bij Podio gebruikers, is het duidelijk dat jullie sociale collaboratie ook omarmen.

Nieuw bij Podio? Podio is een collaboratief werk platform dat teams helpt meer samen te bereiken, zonder e-mail overlading of document chaos. U kunt uwzelf vandaag nog hiergratis inschrijven om samen te werken op Podio net als de 200.000 bedrijven die al hun manier van werken hebben veranderd.

Hier is wat informatie over hoe Podio u en uw team kan helpen met het beheren van uw projecten en werk processen efficiënter en fijner kan maken:

Podio is gebouwd om te werken zoals u.
U kunt Podio personaliseren, zonder technische kennis, om te werken zoals u wilt. Of u nu projecten beheert of bedrijfsprocessen zoals sales leads, rekrutering en marketing draait – met de Podio App Builder kunt u het hulpmiddel maken dat je nodig hebt.

Ontsnap aan e-mail overlading en document chaos.
Podio verplaatst uw werk uit uw inbox naar een sociale activiteiten stroom. Het is nooit makkelijker geweest om transparantie en verantwoordelijkheid te verbeteren. Krijg realtime updates over de vooruitgang van het werk van uw team, deel status updates en bestanden – alles op één sociale plaats.

Werk op de manier die u wilt, waar u wilt.
Werk draait om wat u doet, niet waar u het doet. Krijg werk gedaan via Podio.com of met de Podio app voor iPhone, iPad en Android. Collaboreer met uw team, waar u ook bent.

Gebruik Podio vandaag nog in het Nederlands
Als u al gebruik maakt van Podio, kunt u de taal instellen naar Nederlands door te klikken op “My account” links boven op Podio; kies “Account settings” en daar zult u de talen optie vinden. En als u nog niet op Podio bent, kunt u een gratis account krijgen op podio.com.

We hebben ook Podio Preferred Partners in het Nederlands die u kunnen helpen om Podio te implementeren en met technisch werk dat zich kan voordoen zoals het bouwen van integraties met bestaande systemen. Leer hier meer over uw locale Podio partners.

Podioは初めてですか？Podioは共同作業プラットフォームで、Ｅメールの過重負担や書類の混乱なしに、より多くの目標をチームで達成できます。ここから無料でサインアップできますので、既に仕事のやり方を変えた20万もの企業に加わりましょう。

以下は、あなたやチームがプロジェクトおよび仕事の進捗状況をより効果的で楽しく管理できるようにするPodioの概要です ：

Podioはあなたの仕事に合わせて構築できます。

あなたのスタイルで仕事ができるように、技術的なスキルなしに Podio　をカスタマイズできます。プロジェクトの管理またはセールスリードの対応、採用、マーケティングキャンペーンなどのビジネス過程を管理している場合、Podioのアプリケーションビルダーを使って、特定のニーズに合わせてツールを作成することができます。

Ｅメールの過重負担や書類の混乱を回避。

Podioは仕事を受信トレイから、社会活動のストリームに移動します。透明性や説明責任の向上がこれまで以上に容易にできます。チームの仕事の進捗状況をリアルタイムで確認することや、ステータスの更新およびファイルの共有など、これらすべてを1つのソーシャルな場所で実行できます。

好きな場所で、あなたのスタイルで仕事をする。

仕事は何をするかがすべてで、何処でするかではありません。Podio.com または  iPhone、iPad、Android用のPodioアプリケーションを使って仕事をこなしましょう。何処にいてもチームと共同作業ができます。

今すぐPodioの日本語版をお試しください

既にPodioを使用している場合は、Podioの左上隅にある「私のアカウント」をクリックし、「アカウントの設定」を選択すると言語のオプションが表示されますので、そこから設定を日本語に変更できます。Podioをこれから使用される場合は、こちらから無料のアカウントを作成できます。