Not only am I a member of the team that created OnePlace for business team collaboration and organization, but I'm also a regular user of OnePlace. It runs in my browser from the moment the day begins until I close my laptop cover at the end of the day. Needless to say, I use OnePlace a lot, both in my professional and personal lives. So, I figured I would share with you today the top five things I really like about OnePlace.

It keeps me organized

If you're like me, you have a lot of things going on in your life. There are constantly things to be done at work, and commitments I've made to fellow coworkers and customers that need to followed through on. Couple that with all the stuff going on in my personal life, and wala, I've got an organizational situation on my hands. When I was starting out my career, I used to try to manage all those things in my head, which generally worked ok as long as things stayed routine and predictable. However, when the pressure increased due to deadlines, and when my workload spiked, I found it much harder to keep priorities straight. Stuff fell through the cracks in my brain. I just couldn't manage that much information in my short term memory. By having a tool like OnePlace to keep track of everything I need to do, and being able to manage my work by scheduling it, I've found that things run much smoother and less stressful for me. A while back we coined the phrase "Set it and forget it" to describe the feeling you have when you capture an important commitment in OnePlace, and then allow you mind to forget about it so it can move onto the next important thing. Knowing that OnePlace will remind you later when its time to turn your attention back to that commitment is a very calming and empowering feeling.

I can bring it with me

I love the fact that when I leave the house, I bring OnePlace with me on my smart phone. Work is not defined for me between the hours of 8am and 5pm, Monday through Friday. Being in charge of a 24 x 7 Software as a Service offering means that work is often necessary outside of those times. Being able to access my team's discussions, enter tasks and read new notifications on my iPhone no matter where I am helps me be effective in my role. In addition to that, I can also access my family's shared grocery list when doing weekly shopping at the grocery store - just another benefit of mobile OnePlace.

Makes me feel like I'm in the same office as my coworkers

The OnePlace team is 100% virtual. We all work out of different locations. OnePlace provides my team with a place online in which to communicate, collaborate and complete work, and is 100% indispensable for us. We couldn't do what we're doing without something like OnePlace. In fact, there's even one member of our team (our web designer) that some of us have never met in person, however, through our interaction with her in OnePlace, that's never been an issue, not once.

It gives my team a place to "hang out"

Everyone on my team uses the OnePlace Dashboard. Whenever I have a question or comment for my team, I fire off a message via my OnePlace Dashboard, and within seconds I generally have a response from one or more people. Sometimes my message is a question related to work, sometimes it's just a funny comment I want to make with no real purpose in mind other than hopefully soliciting a smile or two. The typical kind of thing that happens around the office watercooler every day. Because everyone hangs out in OnePlace throughout the day, I seldom feel like I'm working by myself.

Everything has its place

I think this is the greatest strength of OnePlace. We put everything in OnePlace - customer and vendor contact information, log in information for numerous web services we utilize, all design and product documentation, every commitment we've made to each other and to our customers, so on and so forth. We use workplaces, projects and lists to keep all this information structured and organized so that finding it later on is predictable (and when that fails, the OnePlace Search has my back). I don't have to worry about where the latest version of a file is. I know where it is. It's in OnePlace. I don't have to worry about where a conversation is that we had about the design of a new product feature. I know where it is. It's in OnePlace. I don't have to worry that a team member will forgot to do something I asked him to do, because the task I assigned to him is in OnePlace, and OnePlace has numerous ways to nag him to get it done. In a nutshell, OnePlace gives us a big filing cabinet in the cloud where we can file away things that are important to us. This information is not scattered across our company in email, file servers, disconnected IM chats, etc. We know where it is. It's in OnePlace.