App Awareness Month – Mavenlink

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. This week, we’re focusing on applications that make collaboration easier and provide seamless document management. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Mavenlink – Enterprise-Grade Collaboration and Project Management

Mavenlink, a pioneering member of the Google Apps Marketplace, is an enterprise-grade collaboration and project management tool that allows teams and groups to work together more efficiently and effectively. With both real-time group and also private messaging, a full activity stream and email integration, Mavenlink lets all of your team members contribute to the project through their preferred communication method, which reduces the headaches of trying to get everyone onto a new system.

Mavenlink offers a number of other services when you upgrade to the pro versions, such as time and expense tracking, invoices, budgeting tools, as well as Quickbooks and PayPal integration. It’s a very complete tool that many businesses could use for the majority of their core collaboration, project management and even billing workflow needs.

Google Apps Integration

For us, the best feature of Mavenlink is that it leverages a number of key integrations with the Google Apps suite, including Google Docs, Contacts, Calendar and Tasks. These integrations allow you to do more inside of Mavenlink, and reduce the need to jump in between Mavenlink and native Google Apps. A great example is sharing a document out to a group of people or workstream. When you add that Google Doc to your post via Mavenlink, everyone on that thread is automatically given View-only access to that Doc, and you can choose to give them Edit access as well. This is a key integration that separates Mavenlink from many other collaboration and project management tools.

Integration with Calendar and Tasks is useful if you’re managing a team of people who aren’t as familiar with Mavenlink, and would prefer to use native Google Apps tools. You can simply assign tasks, deadlines and other events to these contributors, who can receive notifications through Google Tasks or Google Calendar. It makes collaborating on a project easier for everyone.

Why We Like It

Mavenlink is a serious tool for collaboration and project management and we are very impressed with the level of sophistication in the product. However, Mavenlink’s deep integration with several pieces of the Google Apps for Business suite make it uniquely valuable. Multiple integrations bring huge value to Mavenlink customers accessing the product from within Google Apps and Mavenlink is a great example of just how far third-party applications can go to extend the native functions of Google Apps.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: This app makes finding attachments a snap!

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.