StreamFocus™ Blog

We opened for beta a couple weeks ago. Since then we’ve received some great feedback, and we’re continuing to improve the product and invite more people for trials. Peter has written a great review. He points out a number of weaknesses in the UI, all of which I agree with. Much of our early work was spent on developing the ideas for the software and how to organize projects and workflows and our collaboration system. We have improved the UI a lot in the last month and still have work to do. We’ll be adding a few ajax elements to streamline use where plain html isn’t sufficient, but without overloading it. We appreciate the feedback.

We do need to create more documentation and explanation of how the system works. We’re planning a screencast, a short video, explaining the underlying principles of the system and how to make it work for your projects. It’s not difficult once you know the steps to take. Currently, an overview of the concepts is on the homepage.

In addition to the beta, Fred and I made a presentation of the product for AIASF, where we met a few people in the architecture and construction field. As small business owners, they have a few employees, but the number of tasks gets beyond the number they can manage in their heads. This is what StreamFocus is designed for. Tasks can be entered ahead of time, by days, weeks or months as you need and a critical path established that sets the sequence those tasks must happen for the project to move ahead. Organized into workflows, the team members will know which tasks to work on now - those that are in the critical path - rather than being confused by non top priority tasks that should not be worked on yet in their to do list. If priorities change, the team member task lists will automatically change when critical path links are moved in the project plan area. The automatic priority system works for any team, from 1 to any number of team members.

We’re continuing to expand the beta by giving out more invitations. Please sign up. We look forward to learning what will work for you.