In school this year I’ve been assigned a very large group research project with four other students.  Traditionally, these kinds of projects start off pretty straightforward, with each person working individually to find data to solve a business problem.  But as the team gathers its research, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort though, organize, and actually use the myriad of stuff found by everyone.  This presents a significant problem when the project begins to take shape and the research everyone has collected needs to be applied to solutions dreamed up by the team after a lot of research has been done.

Luckily there are an increasing number of online collaborative tools that can be utilized to make collecting, finding, sorting, and editing online data found by a group of people easier.  My team has found Evernote and Dropbox to be extremely useful in helping us get through this process more efficiently.

I set up a new Evernote account and gave my team the username and password so that the five of us can use this one account.  Now we can clip data from web pages, tag these data with the subject matter and the name of the person tagging, and deposit it all into this one account.  It takes about 10 seconds to select specific text from a web page or the entire page and save it in Evernote’s servers (using the Evernote web clipper).  The result is a huge repository of research that can be searched and referenced extremely quickly by everyone, anytime.  Additionally, you can make blank notes to allow team members to share random ideas with each other.  For example, we have a note called “solution ideas” where all group members can quickly add and edit a running list of ideas within this note for solving our business problem.  This note is then used to provoke discussion when we have meetings.

While Evernote is great for storing text from websites and personal notes, it isn’t all that great for storing group documents or other files.  Now, it does have the ability to add any file to a note if you have a premium account (at $5 per month), but I don’t love this functionality.  (I discussed this in a previous post, here.  See the “file by file online backups” section.)  Dropbox is the solution my team is using for storing research found in pdf form or original documents that we create for our project.  Using my own Dropbox account, I created a folder called “research” and shared folder this with my teammates.  With everyone using the Dropbox desktop software, the folder and a copy of its contents is placed on all of our computers.  All teammates now have the ability to search for, add, and edit anything in this folder.  And while the folder to find these group docs is stored on our of computers locally, any changes made in the documents within these specific folders are synced with copies of these files stored on Dropbox’s servers, and in turn synced on all of the other teammate’s local folders.  (For more info about Dropbox, I have previously written about it here – again in the “file by file online backups” section.)

I am extremely impressed with these two products, and they have made this massive group project a heck of a lot easier for basically free.  Group collaboration is always tough, but these days I’m glad the Internet has tools like these to vastly improves this process.

Stay tuned for an inevitable future update after I FINALLY get my Google Wave invite – that thing’s all about making online group collaboration easier.

Related posts:

1. Evernote Rocks.

For a short while, I was the “Junior Service Writer” at Springboard Media in Philadelphia PA.  In this job, I dealt with everyone who wanted to bring their Apple computers in for repair.  I learned a few important things during my short tenure:

1. Customer service jobs are the worst.  The. Worst.  When I took this job, I forgot the lesson I had previously learned both as a waiter and GAP employee: Daily exposure to the unchecked Id of the general public is a powerful corrosive to any optimism, idealism, or compassion one feels towards her/his fellow human beings.
2. As a new low-level employee, it is extremely hard to change the culture or the ways in which more senior employees do their jobs.  It doesn’t matter how correct, brilliant, or “fresh” your ideas are – if people don’t trust your opinions, they will not listen to a word you say.  (And as it turns out, talking about your fancy MBA schoolin’ to make yourself sound smarter just makes you sound like an ass).
3. Most people think hard drives are magic and will work forever.  Then when tragedy strikes and they learn that this is not the case, these people scream and/or sob at junior service writers who tell them they need to fork over a bunch of money for the possibility that their data might be saved.  (No, AppleCare does not cover the cost of data recovery if your hard drive fails while still under warranty.)

Of course, before this job I too was dragging my feet about backing up my computer.  But after watching a second unlucky graduate student completely fall apart at the thought of his dissertation being lost forever, I decided to purchase my first external hard drive for backing up my data.

External Hard Drives

These have always been a great way to back up stuff, and they are getting even better with more advanced software.  As a Mac guy, I of course use Time Machine, which is the easiest backup solution I’ve ever encountered.  Time Machine comes with the OS 10.5, but not any earlier versions of the Mac operating system.  You just plug in an external hard drive, follow the few steps needed to make it your Time Machine backup destination, and turn on the program.  It backs up everything on your computer every hour, as long as your external drive is plugged into your computer.  If you have a Time Capsule, your hard drive doesn’t even have to be plugged into the computer – the hard drive is on your wireless transmitter, facilitating wireless backups.  And finding an old file in your archived data is really easy with the trippy user interface Time Machine has to search the external drive.  I’m not sure if it’s the best backup solution – its simplicity might be a real drawback to people who require more robust solutions like off-site backups.  For those options, check out this blog post.

PC users – check this article out about various free PC backup solutions.

Online Backup Systems

Online backup solutions are poping up all over the place as data storage gets cheaper and cheaper.  Here’s a good review of the biggest players in this industry.  From what I have seen of online backup solutions, there are two basic kinds – ones that are meant to backup your entire system, and the ones that are meant to backup specific files for quick online retrieval.

Entire system online backups
When I first heard of Mozy online backup, I was really excited and tried it out immediately.  This service gives you 2GB of space for free, and an unlimited amount for $5 a month.  When downloaded and set up, it can back up your entire hard drive onto remote servers in Alaska or something.  If the hard drive in your computer does crash, you can get your data back by redownloading all of it various ways or by getting Mozy to send you DVDs with your data on them.

It is the nature of Mozy and other solutions like it to be running all the time.  It took my initial backup of the 70 or so gigabites 2 weeks of constant communication with off site servers to finish uploading.  After this initial backup, your computer syncs any updated files every hour or so.  After a while, I found this to be aggravating and hard to ignore.  There were the occasional error messages, and it slowed down my machine very slightly.  (Others have found this to be a bigger issue.)  Also, Mozy will not backup things that are not on your computer.  Therefore, if you delete a file, it will delete that file off your backup data on their servers after 30 days or so.  It was because of this (I think), every time I opened Windows using Parallels, Mozy would spend the next day or so re-backing up the 6GB of space that Windows takes up on my computer.  It was like it would forget Windows was installed on my machine when Parallels wasn’t running, and then back it up in its entirety every time I used Parallels.  As a result, I never really had any confidence that Mozy was keeping the most up-to-date copies of my files.  I got rid of it after 2 months.

File-by-file online backups
My experience with Mozy has soured my view of entire system online backup solutions.  My external hard drive plus Time Machine is much less complicated, faster, and safer.  There are other online services out there, however, that will allow you to store individual files or entire folders onto off site servers and that provide great web interfaces to retrieve these files.  The problem I have had with most of these is that there is usually no way to edit the file directly from the place it is being downloaded.  There is also usually no way for the file being backed up to be immediately updated on the off site servers after it is edited from my computer.  (Evernote does this to some degree, but the problem with this is that when you store a file in Evernote, it is actually copied from its original location in your computer to a file within the Evernote file system in your computer.  Therefore if you save a file in Evernote, open it later, edit it, and close it, and then you want to email just that file to someone, it’s a pain to find that exact document within the confusing file structure Evernote creates in your computer to store its data.  Once you find it you then have to rename it, and….ugh).

I had planned to end this post with the message that while my external hard drive and Time Machine works really well for my entire system backup, I had not found a file-by-file solution that didn’t end up being more work than just saving files to my computer and ending it there.  But in my research for this post I found a great product that I am now using to back up all of my most important documents.  Dropbox is an online storage product that places a folder directly in my Finder (Windows Explorer for PC folks) which is automatically synced to Dropbox servers.  After moving my most important document folders into this “dropbox” folder, I can open, save, and edit all my documents directly from my computer, and any changes made to them will by synced to copies of these files on Dropbox’s servers.  The service gives me 2 gigs of server space for free, and after that there are pretty reasonable monthly fees for a lot more space – you could back up your entire system.  I’m happy with only saving my most accessed documents, however, so 2 gigs is fine.

There are some other features of this service that are really cool, too:

• I can easily invite anyone I want to have access to any of the files I place in my account.  As long as they download the DropBox software onto their computer, any edits they make to the documents will be synced to the off site servers and all other computers sharing those documents.  If the invitee does not want to download the software, they can download all shared documents, but any edits will not be synced.   
• Each file has a public url, so I can link directly to files using this url and access them via any web browser.
• There is web access to all my files stored online, so I can access them anywhere with an internet connection.
• I can view my stored files on my iPod Touch/iPhone using its mobile website.

With Time Machine, Drop Box, and my AppleCare warranty with two years remaining on it, I feel as confident as I can* that my data is safe and I won’t end up in financial ruin if something happens to my computer.

*AppleCare DOES NOT cover accidental damage to your computer!  So if I spill something on my keyboard or crack my screen, I’m SOL.  I learned that lesson from Springboard as well….so sad.

Related posts:

1. Group projects are now slightly less awful