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Pamela is a must have add-on solutions for all you Skype users.

• robotstxt.org

Too often projects are over-managed to the point of inefficiency with complex tools such as Microsoft Project. For those of us enlightened in the world of Agile, we have Scrum.

One of the key elements of Scrum is the simplicity of identifying tasks, prioritising them and working throught the most important ones first. There are various tools available to support Scrum, but a simpler application that can implement some of these key concepts is SimpleTODO - project management software.

An interesting little application that can be used for all kinds of task management and it’s free.

PROS

CONS

As information technology becomes ever more impingent on our daily lives, it appears that the list of logins and passwords we must remember is becoming unmanageably long with a different account for every IT system we use: accounts for domain hosting; accounts for ftp access; accounts for websites; accounts for Windows systems; accounts for accounts; etc.

There is an answer to this dilemna for anonymity and security…

KeePass is an open source project over on Sourceforge.

Its features include:

• Highly encrypted databases
• Support of master passwords and key-disks
• Runs on all Windows operating systems and doesn’t need to be installed
• Export password list to TXT, HTML, XML or CSV files
• Import from CSV, CodeWallet(Pro) TXT and Password Safe v2 TXT files
• Easy database transfer
• Support of password groups
• Time fields and entry attachment support
• Auto-type, global auto-type hot key combination and drag-n-drop support
• Intuitive and secure Windows clipboard handling
• Searching and sorting
• Multi-language support
• Strong random password generator
• Low memory requirement
• Plugin architecture
• Open-Source!

It will fit on and run from a FlashDrive or other removable media without having to install it where and whenever you need it. There is also a version for PocketPC.

Is it secure? Its use of strong cryptography for encrypting the database does indeed make it pretty well secure… well as secure as current best practice. It is secure enough for RSL to start using it.

However, there are a few things that could improve it … but that’s another story, for another day!

Craig Murphy - The Social Programmer has just posted a blog entry “Blog it, write it down, publish it: communicate and organise” where he mentions that he likes the idea of using blogs for project teams.

Whilst blogs can indeed be useful for teams, Wikis and collaborative tools such as eGroupware and Microsoft’s Sharepoint are stronger tools to be using within the team space. RSL has been a convert to Wikis since being introduced to them by Abdel and Jon Mountjoy over at eXtreme Wednesday.

We’re in the process of using eGroupware in a government sponsored collaborative project. More on this later once it is all done and running!