Collaboration:  

eStudio excels in collaboration. The program management program has a collaboration tab that offers five different methods of communication: Live Chat, Discussions, Presentations, Quick Notes and Web links. These five options essentially cover every form of communication that a project manager or team member might want or need to keep current updates and changes available to all users.

Resource Management:  

Adding and assigning resources to several tasks is simple. You can also easily add notes for each resource, helping you better determine who is best able to complete a given task, as well as determine pay rates and updating contact information.

Project Management:  

eStudio comes with a task manager that lets you build tasks, add notes and assign specific resources to each task. Several options for displaying goals, timelines and priorities are also available within the project management software. eStudio’s Gantt chart, while basic and fundamental, is customizable and easy to read.

In eStudio’s workspace area, you can upload documents for review or approval. The files are then stored within the project management software as a secondary backup location. However, giving multiple users access to this one location can raise issues, since each user has complete access to everyone's documents. This might also lead to situations where team members could be working on obsolete versions of a document.

Ease of Use:  

While eStudio’s design is straight-forward, it will take you some time to get used to where the various functions and tools are located, and how to use them within the project management software. eStudio does include tutorials and help options to smooth this process.

Clicking on links sometimes brings up a JavaScript error. It can take several clicks to actually get where we want to go. Also, when running in secure mode, the program slows down.

Help/Support:  

eStudio’s help selection has several forms of documentation, tutorials, Flash demos and a walk-through to help you master the project management program. eStudio also offers email and toll-free phone support. eStudio runs on all recent Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

eStudio is only $50 a month (for unlimited users)—fairly inexpensive for a browser-based program management suite. However, the program simply doesn’t have the streamlined features inherent to our higher-ranked products.