In the previous post, we discussed Friction Losses, which are mostly due to administrative overhead or inefficient tools. Ofuz helps freelancers reduce Friction Losses. Let’s take a look at how Ofuz can make life better for the freelancer.
From Status Report-Readers to Collaborators
Does anyone really like creating or reading status reports? Don’t get me wrong, it’s important for freelancers to keep their clients in the know about project status, risks, and milepost completion. But with Ofuz, you can convert status report-readers into stakeholders and collaborators by providing more granular updates, and inviting stakeholder participation. The result can be tighter collaboration and better project workflow.
Here’s a quick walkthrough of how our freelancer would use Ofuz to keep his client, co-workers, and any subcontractors he’s employed in the know:
Our freelancer creates a new project in Ofuz.
He adds contacts for client stakeholders, co-workers, and/or subcontractors, and then adds these new contacts to the project.
Our freelancer adds tasks to the project.
Any time he has something he wants to remember, or report to client stakeholders, co-workers, or subcontractors, our freelancer adds notes to project tasks, sometimes using the @username nudge feature to help stakeholders know when their involvement or response is required.
So what has our intrepid freelancer gained from using Ofuz in this situation?
The client is more comfortable because they’re not waiting for a weekly status update. They know the current status immediately.
Our freelancer has a documentation trail for their own reference. Any medium or large project gets complex and demands that the freelancer track detail carefully. With Ofuz, these notes are integrated into a single place, made searcheable, and are sent by email to clients (and co-wokers) if they want. So one stone kills two birds: our freelancer’s project notes also become micro-updates to the client and co-wokers, with no extra effort on the freelancer’s part.
Project status and client communication are integrated to a single interface, rather than being spread among multiple email threads, documents, etc.
What About Those Weekly Status Reports?
Most clients will probably still want them so you’ll still send them, but with Ofuz you can save some time and effort.
Ofuz has a great email list feature that reveals itself to you when you select one or more contacts. But first, our freelancer spends a few minutes creating a status report template. To create an email template:
From anywhere in Ofuz, click Settings.
On the left of the screen, click Email Templates.
Here, our freelancer creates a template for his weekly status report, using mail merge fields wherever possible. For more information on this Ofuz feature, see this post.
Then, when our freelancer is ready to create a weekly status report, he does the following:
From anywhere in Ofuz, click the Contacts tab.
Select the recipients for the status report (remember, you can import contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter). Remember you can also tag your recipients and select multiple contacts based on a common tag.
After selecting the recipients, our freelancer clicks Send a Message from the context menu.
The Send Message window appears. Our freelancer selects the email template they previously created, and then fills in the particulars for this week’s status report.
Our freelancer clicks Send Mailing and gets back to making money (or knocks off early for happy hour!).
Using the Ofuz email template for weekly status reports helps automate a repetitive task. Sure, our freelancer could send out status reports from his email account using an attached PDF or the like, but there’s a friction loss caused by switching tools. Ofuz is a unified system that helps reduce these kinds of friction losses.
Better File Sharing With Ofuz
Our freelancer is now using Ofuz for the majority of his communication with stakeholders and co-workers now. That’s great, but what about files he needs to send to his client, and files that his client needs to send him?
Here at Ofuz, we love our product passionately, but we know its limits. Ofuz is not designed to replace a full-featured file repository and versioning system like SVN or DropBox. However, Ofuz has a great file sharing portal that can replace email attachments as a means for sending files to and from clients. You know, those single-file attachments you would usually use email to send?
For our freelancer to send files to his client or to co-workers is easy:
From anywhere in Ofuz, click the Tasks tab.
Click the note icon to the right of the task name (it looks like this: ).
In the Get into the discussion field, type an explanatory note for the file you are about to attach.
Click More Options.
Click Choose File, and then browse to and select the file you want to attach.
Click Add this item.
That’s it! Anyone who has access to the project can get this file now. Remember, that if you need a specific person to see the file, you can always use the @username nudge feature to notify them about the new file attachment.
Now, how about when our freelancer’s client needs to send files to the freelancer? Even if they don’t have an Ofuz user account, our freelancer can create a web-based portal where the client can upload files to the project. It’s easy!
From anywhere in Ofuz, click the Contacts tab.
Click on the contact’s name (not the white space around the contact).
The contact detail page appears. On the left side of the window, click share files and notes.
Click Click Here to Turn on File Sharing with contactname.
Ofuz will give you a personalized web address that they can use to upload files and notes to the project.
Stay Tuned For More
In the next post on Friday of this week, we’ll continue to see how our intrepid freelancer can continue to lubricate his workflow and reduce Friction Losses using Ofuz. If you have any thoughts on this post, please let us know in the comments!
One of the joys of freelance work is the low overhead of working on your own. No full-time accountants to pay, no administrative staff to manage. However, for every successful freelancer (that’s you, right?), there comes a time when the work of being your own accountant, marketing department, and administrative assistant starts to dilute your hourly rate.
Friction Losses: Going Up in Unbillable Smoke
The rule of thumb that says a freelancer will be able to bill for half of the hours they work is based, at least in part, on the fact that most freelancers are their own accountant, marketing department, and administrative assistant. 50% of the hours a typical freelancer works go up in unbillable smoke because of these necessary administrative functions. I call these Friction Losses, because they can be reduced, but never completely eliminated.
You can reduce Friction Losses with better technology and better processes. Everyone has a different definition of better, but in general I mean:
Easier to use
Automates repetitive tasks
Leverages integration
That’s pretty abstract stuff, but stay tuned because in the next few blog posts here we’ll take you through how Ofuz helps freelancers reduce Friction Losses.
Opportunity Losses: Where Your Next Meal is Coming From
Business growth is a tricky thing. For anyone who bills on an hourly basis, being busy brings in more money. But, what if you’re so busy doing your thing that you don’t have time to develop new business opportunities and leads? That’s an Opportunity Loss.
A lot of my freelancing friends have a single client. The rest of us are juggling multiple clients. The biggest Opportunity Loss is going from being very busy doing your thing to suddenly being idle because you were too busy to develop new clients and leads. No matter how many clients you have, if you are occupied working on projects, sending out invoices, and making sure all of those little tasks are checked off your to do list, when are you going to find the time to go get the next job? Again, better tools can help.
Freelancers can reduce Opportunity Losses by better leveraging integration. For example, every existing and past client is a potential bridge to new clients. Ofuz offers unified contact management and project management that helps you use that list of names locked up in your email software to help you collaborate and reach out to existing and potential clients better.
Clean Your Desk With Ofuz: Invoice, Tasks, and Contacts in One Place
Every freelancer with a growing business reaches the tipping point: the point where they ask the question, “Should I hire help with this so I can focus on doing my thing?” The point where things might start to drop between the cracks and where invoicing using those Word or Excel templates is starting to look bush league. The point where managing your collaboration with a bunch of Google Docs files isn’t cutting it anymore.
Ofuz can help you navigate the tipping point more easily and efficiently. Ofuz brings together the bulk of your freelance management tasks into a unified interface. With contact management, task tracking, collaboration, and easy invoicing, Ofuz helps freelancers do their thing more easily. Sign up for an account today.
In the next few blog posts, we’ll show how specific Ofuz features help freelancers reduce Friction and Opportunity Losses. Stay tuned!
They gave us a 4.5 score which is one of the top scores,
Thank you guys
We are taking notes of your suggestion on expenses and integration with stronger accounting applications.
http://usefultools.com is a great review site for web application, they actually review and test the applications they talk about.
Its a great place to find good web app for your business or personal use.
Timesheets made their official appearance in Ofuz a few weeks back.
We’ve been playing around with the concept for some time. So today we decided to release the first draft of what will become a powerful time management application.
In this first version we’re covering:
Tracking your time on a contact or client.
Tracking time on tasks in a project.
Viewing your and your co-workers’ daily work logs, notes, and time recorded.
Total time for all client & project tasks, weekly or monthly.
Online time tracking, time management, and timesheets are wide subjects so the goal of this initial version is to offer very simple, non-intrusive features to cover as much usage as possible. They are tons of good reasons to track your time and no reason for not doing it. Time is the most precious resource we have.
Time tends to just pass, so tracking time is a good start. But being able to come back and review what was done during the recorded time is precious.
So we attached a time entry section to notes. You can add a note to a Contact or in a Project discussion, and using that note you can enter an amount of time, in hours, related to the time spent.
The idea is to not only track time but to be able to come back to it and see, “where did my time go?”
I often have that feeling that the day just flies by and at the end I get this frustration of not having done anything.
So I keep a record of all my activity throughout the day. For each client or task I work on, I enter a short description of what I did along with the number of hours I spent doing it.
This creates a kind of work log that’s very useful. If I go in my Dashboard and click “Notes & Discussion” I can view all the daily activity like a chronological journal of the day’s events.
If I share project or contacts with my coworkers, I can also see their activity on those contact and projects.
Daily work log of project discussions and contact notes
To get a total of all the time spent by contact, I click on the Timesheet tab where I can filter by Month or Week.
It will display all the time I’ve recorded and all the time recorded by my co-workers on the projects and contacts we share.
Monthly Timesheet
Timesheets are used to record time you spend on a contact or on tasks in a project.
To record some time you spent on a contact or in a project task discussion, start by adding a note and click on the ” More Options” link.
Expend the Notes options
It will pop up a long list of options associated with your note including the Hours Worked.
Record time in the Hours Worked field
Type the hours with a short summary or note related to those hours entered as a reference.
It works the same way on project discussion notes. For each note you can add time and adjust that time when you edit the discussion.
Ofuz is pleased to announce the first public beta of our online application for Small Businesses.
Ofuz is Software as a Service that covers the full business cycle, from getting customers up to getting paid, all in a very easy to use and clean user interface.
Ofuz is composed of 4 main applications: Contact management, Task and todo manager, Project management, and Invoicing, with must-have features for all small businesses such as email marketing, file & document exchange, drop box emails, web forms, contact synchronization, time-sheets, off-line support and social network integration.
Ofuz is focused on customer relations and communication with a minimalist user interface so every feature can be understood instantly.
“Over the past 10 years we’ve collected all the needs from our small business customers, who were frustrated by not finding an Open Source package that answers those needs in a single package. We decided to build it. Today we have a fully working base that works great for us and our 200+ beta testers” says Philippe Lewicki, CEO.
“This release is the first step towards our open source strategy. The current version of Ofuz will be the base for a much larger Open Source project. With a standardized User Interface and a simple Plug-In API, developers will be able to expand Ofuz and customize Ofuz to adapt it to all types of small businesses. Our goal is to do for the business application what Drupal & WordPress did to the CMS and blogging world” continues Lewicki.
Ofuz is a fully usable application open to all small business looking to get control of their leads, todos, documents, and payments.
About Ofuz
Ofuz ( http://www.ofuz.com ) is a startup based in Los Angeles, CA.
It is funded ($250,000) and created by SQLFusion ( http://www.sqlfusion.com/ ) an Open Source support, software development and incubator company based in Southern California. Created in 2003, SQLFusion also developed MailFusion, FormFusion, Open Source Fusion, Drag Drop Sitecreator, Radria, Mashtweet and YogaGlo.
This is a short tutorial on how to use Ofuz’s drop box feature to get sent email messages attached directly to your Ofuz contacts.
Once set up, when working on a lead, prospect or even a client, you will have all your associated notes and emails in one central location.
Previously, to add a note in Ofuz you needed to type it in or copy and paste text. To make this simpler for email messages that you send and want to keep in Ofuz, we’ve implemented a drop box.
A drop box is a special email address that’s generated only for you. You can then use that email address in all of your email messages as a CC or BCC to keep a copy of your emails in Ofuz.
Ofuz will automatically detect to whom you are sending the message and then attach your email to that contact.
If that contact doesn’t exist it will be created and the email message attached to it.
This makes life much simpler – as we are working a lot with emails, it’s convenient to be able to create new contacts or organize your email messages without having to open another application.
You can find the Add Note drop box in Settings → add note drop box.
In the example below, I use my drop box to add a message I sent to Abhik via Ofuz.
As seen above, I’ve added the add note drop box as a BCC. Doing so will add a copy of the email as a Note on Abhik’s contact page in Ofuz.
Add the BCC to new emails and the emails you reply to, and you will be able to keep a pretty accurate copy of your conversations.
If the contact doesn’t exist in Ofuz, it will be created and then your email will also be added as a Note.
This is a feature that I use a lot because it enables me to find past conversations and information in a Contact-centric manner.
I didn’t want to have to add a drop box for each email I wrote, so I used a feature of my email software that will automatically add the add-note drop box email address as a BCC to all the emails I send.
To enable this in Mozilla Thunderbird, go in Edit -> Accounts -> Copies & Folders then check the box “Bcc these email addresses” and enter your add note drop box.
This setting will add a copy of all the messages sent and attached it to the contacts in Ofuz.
Some email software like Gmail will also allow you to add a copy of all the email you receive.
In Gmail, go to Settings -> Forwarding / POP3/IMAP, and then in “Forward a copy of incoming email to”, enter your add note drop box.
You can also adjust this with filters and only add specific email messages to Ofuz.
That’s all on this feature.
To summarize, the add-note drop box can be found in your Ofuz settings in the Note Drop box tab.
It can then be used when you send emails to keep a copy of that email in Ofuz.
We have added a new notation in project discussions to address a specific participant. It looks like this: @firstname. It’s like a ping or a nudge.
You see, Ofuz has an approach to project management that’s very much oriented around discussions.
For us, managing a project is primarily about communication and secondly about metrics. Most of the project management software I’ve personally used in the past were mainly metrics oriented: hour per hour estimates, hourly rates, time line Gantt charts… Those are very cool features but most of the time they get in the way of doing the real work, which is communication.
So in Ofuz, projects are firstly a discussion with everybody involved in the project and secondly about metrics (yes, we have them, but it will be the topic of a future blog post)
In Ofuz, the project tasks have a flow of discussion; to make sure we do not miss anything it’s integrated with emails. So each new comment in a Tasks discussion sends an email to all of the project’s participants. The discussion can then continue with emails – if one of the participant does a Reply All, that email response will also be added to the Tasks discussion.
The result are very well documented tasks, with all the details, progress, and changes that are happening. Yet, it can also be overwhelming.
If you want to get the attention of a particular participant, you can address the discussion note to him.
Thus, we created a special notation. For twitter users it will look familiar: it’s @firstname or @lastname.
If you nudge a participant, s/he will receive a special email alert that is different than the regular tasks discussion alert.
It starts with: {Ofuz:Nudge}
The participant will receive it even if they have the email alert discussion turned off.
Inspired by the twitter notation, we felt that the “nudge” enables quick internal dialogue within a project discussion, limiting the message overload.
That’s all for today…
Let us know what you think. Are you using the feature the same way we do ?
With the hundreds of beta users and thousands of contacts added during beta1, things were getting slow when managing contacts.
The search and tag selection were especially below the acceptable threshold.
So first we built a full Javascript user interface using Google Gears that’s as fast as a desktop application. It also allows you to view your contacts when offline; this will be the base for the future Ofuz Desktop.
To enable Google Gears to manage your Ofuz contacts, go into Settings, choose the Google Gears tab, and then turn it on.
But Gears is not yet available for everyone — like on my Linux 64b desktop.
Then, last week we rewrote the standard web-based version of the contact management section. This added infinite scrolling, so it’s a great performance feature. It initially loads just the first 50 contacts and as you scroll down it loads more contacts until it reaches the end.
Lastly, we moved Ofuz to new hardware servers in a new cloud environment based on Open Source technologies. The result is a 10x performance improvement in Ofuz contact management. Now, even with thousands of contacts the user interface is extremely responsive.
Give us your feedback and let us know how fast it runs for you.
Most email marketing solutions today are limited to anonymous lists of emails to whom you blast general newsletters.
For your email marketing strategy to be efficient, it’s important to send the right message to the right person. The best way to do this is to organize your contacts by category, and then send personalized emails to each of those categories.
In Ofuz we call these categories Tags. They can be used as a category or list and are very flexible, and you can apply as many tags as you want with a contact.
Click on a contact’s name (below, see an example of a contact with Tags):
Now click on the Edit tags or Add tags link, and it will change to:
Here you can remove tags or add new ones. For example, I am adding the tag “new product info” to this contact to send him information and news about our products.
Once you have attached different tags to your contacts you can send a personalized email message to all of the contacts with a specific tag.
Ofuz email sending capabilities are simple but quite powerful. You can send personalized messages by first name and last name to as many contacts as you want, and create and reuse email templates in HTML with rich text formating. A cool feature unique to Ofuz is that you can send Facebook notifications for Facebook friends without email addresses.
To send a message to multiple contacts, go in the Contacts tab and click on a tag that contains the contact you want to send a message to.
Then click in the white part of a contact line. See the screen shot:
Select a contact
It will highlight the contact line in yellow and open a menu of options. Click the same way on all the contacts you want to send the message to.
If you want to select all of your contacts, click on the select all link.
Then click on the send message button and it will open the message composer.
Create an email message or customize an email template
You can see in this example the [firstname] placeholder that will be merged with each contact’s first name.
On the top right you have a drop down that may be empty at first; it’s all the messages you have saved as templates.
You can manage your email templates in Account Settings → Email Templates.
Just below the template list you have another drop down with a list of “fields”. Select one of them and it will add a special code in your email message that will be replaced by the contact equivalent.
For example, add first name and it will add this weird [firstname] code. Place it anywhere you want, and when you send your message it will replace that code with your contact’s First Name.
If you are not ready to send the message yet you can save it as a draft and come back later to finish it.
If it’s an important message that you plan to send to a lot of users, it’s better to first test it. To do that, save the message as draft, go into Contacts and select yourself, and then send the message to your self.
Once you are satisfied with the result, send the message to your appropriate list.
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