I recently attended a presentation on Newforma's project management software, and while I was impressed with its streamlined approach to filing email and making project documents easy to find, it does come at a substantial cost:  annual license fees, training for each user, as well as ongoing server and backup costs.  For a company of say 35 people, these costs could easily run $60,000 the first year, and about $20-30,000 each year after that. This is out of the reach of most small businesses, and if not out of reach, it is difficult to justify when there are techniques to give you this functionality with almost none of the cost - detailed below.

Newforma Project Center offers an system of filing email that interfaces as a rather elegant add-on to Microsoft Outlook. The software allows users to file emails and documents onto their project folders on the networked server. Emails are stored as individual .MSG files and any attached files are linked to that email message in the database that the software creates. The system indexes text throughout the messages, pdfs, word docs, and even CAD files, allowing a project-wide or even company-wide search of the information. By creating one company-wide database of emails, Newforma manages to de-duplicate emails, reducing total storage load. It also offers a simple FTP option for the sending and receiving of files. However, the system has a few drawbacks:

• Ongoing high cost - software, maintanance, server and networking hardware. 
• Complex User Interface - often requires user training.
• Reliance on Microsoft Outlook - upgrades to which may break an add-in for periods of time.

This functionality can be had for much less cost. The suite of tools I use to manage my day to day workload is:

Basecamp – www.basecamphq.com (affiliate link)

• Project management, milestones, to-do lists, task assignments and follow up.
• Cost - Free for a single project, $25-150 per month, unlimited users.

Submittal Exchange – www.submittalexchange.com

• Submittals, RFIs, IBs – Web-based management of construction documentation. Review and markup PDF submittals.
• Cost - less than 0.25% of total project cost – can be paid by architect, owner, or contractor (if written into the bid specifications).

Google Desktop - desktop.google.com/features.html

• Indexing and search of all documents on your computer, as well as networked drives or project folders.
• Cost - Free.

Dropbox – www.dropbox.com (affiliate link)

• Simple file syncing and sharing – no FTP required.
• Cost - Free for 2GB – 50GB for $10 per month.

How it all comes together:

1. Each project goes into Basecamp, providing simple to-do lists. Milestones are created (viewable in Microsoft Outlook calendar), Tasks are assigned to team members and manageble by email or on the basecamp site.
2. Submittal Exchange allows contractors (or other team members) to upload documents for review and markup. Project documents are viewable from any modern web browser.
3. Google Desktop continually indexes files on local and networked hard drives, (including email messages within Outlook), making items instantly searchable. 

4. Dropbox (affiliate link) provides (among other features) a Public folder and Shared folders, for sharing files with particular individual

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