10 Great Uses for Backpack

Let’s cut to the chase- If you don’t know what Backpack is then go here and take a tour using their handy videos.

1. Take a group of people- any people- examples would be a group of students, a group of colleagues in the same industry, a small business, a family that is very involved, a team of distributors, a civil organization and connect them via a shared calendar, message board, journal and writeboards.
2. If you are a consulting business you can share individual pages with each customer or business who work with. The rest of your backpack site would still be private, but the shared page is much more powerful than an email chain back and forth.
3. Implement GTD (Getting Things Done). The home page is a great place for your next actions list, your waiting for list, your errands list and your upcoming meeting notes. Each major project can become it’s own page.
4. Use the icalendar feature in Backpack to share your calendar with Google, Apple or Mozilla Thunderbird calendars. I use Google Calendar, because I haven’t got a MAC yet. It’s on the horizon.
5. Use the message board to streamline your communication with family, your employees or staff, your fellow students and your civic club. Post a message instead of bothering someone with a phone call or email. This way people can respond when they actually have time to think about and reply to your issue. What a way to prevent the 50 interruptions most small business owners experience in a day.
6. Never get caught at a meeting with your pants down. Show up without your laptop- no problem just use anyone with an Internet connection and login to your web-based Backpack account. I keep a reference page that has some passwords, key forms along with other key files, pictures and notes.
7. Use Backpack as a presentation page. No it’s not as fancy as Powerpoint but it’s far more flexible. Plus as I mentioned in #6 it’s web-based. It’s everywhere as long as you have two things: an Internet connection and a phone or computer to access the Internet.
8. Use the Writeboard feature if you collaborate on writing, researching, reporting, developing or any other business where you and several others work together on a project. The writeboard saves new version each time someone edits the main document. You can compare each old version with the new ones with the click of a button.
9. A popular question these days within Facebook, Twitter and all the other Social Media tools is what are your doing? Well the journal in backpack answers that question without asking it. You can keep tabs on what your staff has been working on without asking each of them individually. The same goes for a busy family. What has mom or dad been doing all day? What has been finished and what still needs to be done?
10. Organize, Organize, Organize. This tool will help you organize your calendar, your conversations, your collaboration, your projects, your daily tasks. You may say- well Bryce it doesn’t have email. You’re right, but Google does and it has your contacts to. Backpack is very intuitive and easy to use because it doesn’t try to be all things to all people. Trust me. I love it in combination with Google Apps for email, contact and shared calendaring.

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