I have been very happy with Central Desktop as part of the Abraham Harrison business and client services platform.

We had previously used Basecamp HQ. I didn’t mind it but my team hated it so I had Sara Wilson and Saul Wainwright go out to explore all of the project management, task management, business management, and process management tools out there — a collaboration tool that my team and I could use every day to help synchronize our daily work.

We needed all the help we can get since Abraham Harrison is a virtual and distributed company, spread across 7 countries and 16 times zones. When Saul and Sara finally made their recommendation, they recommended Central Desktop.

Back in April, Saul wrote an article on Marketing Conversation, Central Desktop Does it for us!!, and we received the associated buzz from Central Desktop.

Central Desktop offers a lot of different things, including group shared calendars, collaborative wikis, intranet tools, project collaboration, task management, web conferencing, audio conferencing, extranets tools, project management, forums, group discussions, salesforce.com, global search, online spreadsheets, and iCal compatibility.

We have limited our Central Desktop usage so far to project collaboration, task management, group wikis, asset and file management and storage, group discussions, and the iCal feature. We use Google Apps (Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Calendar) religiously so there are certain things we don’t need from Central Desktop. We’re also slowly drinking the Salesforce.com kool-aid, so I am sure we’ll start making that work for us soon.

Anyway, I am posting Saul’s review of Central Desktop below because I think it is very interesting and I think you’ll learn a lot and maybe check Central Destop out.

Central Desktop Does it for us!!

So, I don’t know if I have mentioned this on our blog. But, we spent months, and I mean literally months looking around for a web based project management tool that met the needs of Abraham Harrison. You would think that this would be an easy mission. Hell no!!

We wanted to dump Basecamp so badly, yet we didn’t wanna go to something else that was kind of….well…ho hum!!! Just when I was at the end of my tether in the search a bit of synchronicity came along and a potential client mentioned Central Desktop to us.

So, off I ran and checked out this software – it was on my list but I hadn’t really give it much of a go. After a week of digging around, having my Executive Assistant dig around in CD – we both agreed that this was the one for us.

It is simple, clean, fast and does what it needs to do. There are elements missing, for sure, but that is a given. My biggest gripe is their need to integrate more time tracking/management capabilities. However, after a phone call with the CEO, Isaac Garcia (heck how often do you get to talk to the CEO of a company as a small time client) he assured me that they are working on many improvements.

What I found so cool about this company (besides their awesome platform) was that they had built this tool up without any major funding, with paying customers – no, “come use us for free” approach in the hope that it would make them popular. No, they did it while having to please paying customers.

So, last week I got an email from Isaac, following up on the phone call we had had a week earlier and he informed me that Central Desktop had just got its first round of major funding – $7 million from Openview Venture Partners. Not bad, not bad at all….especially when you realize that Openview is one of Central Desktops paying customers (well, maybe they will give them a free account).

I like seeing companies do it the old fashion way. Create a good product, get people to buy it and watch it grow. Hell, getting popular off “free giveaways” is always easier, but certainaly doesn’t guarantee a good product.

Congrats Isaac and the CD gang!! We over at AH look forward to more and more slick features and are stoked that you guys are around.

Last week, Mark was contacted by a reporter from IDG who wanted to know about how Abraham Harrison LLC uses Google Apps Premier, and Mark Harrison, our CEO, obliged. The article was published online today, For Web Apps, Get a Service Guarantee, in PC World (via Marketing Conversation):

For example, the Google Apps Premier Edition suite contains an availability guarantee only for its Gmail portion (for 99.9 percent uptime) and offers no commitment for the other components, which include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software.

“It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite,” says Mark Harrison, founding partner of Abraham Harrison LLC, provider of online marketing services.

Abraham Harrison, founded in 2007, has been using Google Apps Premier Edition for about one year, and the uptime of its hosted applications and services, though not 100 percent, has been excellent, according to Harrison. Downtime incidents have been rare and brief, and have never proven disruptive to the company’s operations, he says. “We’ve never been crippled by an outage,” Harrison says.

Still, should a significant Google Apps outage occur, it certainly would impact the company, which is highly dependent on the suite. The company chose Google Apps in order to give its geographically-dispersed staff an array of software to use for communication and collaboration. In addition to the suite’s productivity applications, the company also uses Google Talk instant messenger and Gmail for e-mail. The company’s 22 employees, located in six countries and four continents, operate in 14 different time zones, and since most of their work is collaborative, Google Apps–which lets users jointly edit documents located on a central server–was a better alternative than e-mailing Microsoft Office documents back and forth.

Harrison would also like to see Google Apps provide an offline component that would allow users to work on their local PCs when disconnected from the Internet, a capability he knows Google is pursuing with its Gears technology.

That Harrison would feel more at ease with an SLA is telling. His company isn’t an ordinary Google Apps customer. Although the relationship between Google and Abraham Harrison is purely of the vendor-client type, meaning that the company receives no compensation from Google, the Google Apps team has singled it out as a model small business whose feedback it regularly seeks. As a result, Harrison is in close contact with the Google Apps team.

The thing I love most about Google is that they always offer data-portability. That said, it isn’t always easy to do. I run my entire Global Business on the strong back of Google Apps Premier. Sometimes my Director of Client Services, Saul, harangues me to make backups. Theoretically, it is possible. Now, thanks to Google Operating System and Blogoscoped Forum the possible has become practical, Export All Your Documents from Google Docs:

Google Docs & Spreadsheets doesn’t provide you a way to export all your files at once. But if you use Firefox, there’s a Greasemonkey script that creates a page with links to downloadable versions of your documents and spreadsheets.