YDEK Productions

Tell us more about you, your company and what do you do?

My name is Matt Robenolt, lead developer, and head honcho (according to my business card) at YDEK Productions LLC. We have been making a name for ourselves in the web development industry for a relatively short period of time, and are growing at an extremely rapid pace. At the moment, we're a small team of in-house dudes who work with subcontractors all over the US and clients worldwide. Since we began, we've been leading up work for clients such as Motorola, PBS, American Express, Warner Bros, Microsoft, Intel, and Moleskine.

How did you find out about activeCollab? What were your first impressions?

We have been using activeCollab since it was an open source project, back in the 0.7.x stages. Absolutely loved it, and have honestly never used another collaboration tool since. We have dabbled with Basecamp due to other clients having Basecamp accounts, but never quite got the flow right. Since then, we've talked quite a few of our partners and fellow agencies to ditch their astronomical $50+/month Basecamp fees and switch over to activeCollab.

How were you managing projects before activeCollab? Email, pen and paper, another project management tool?

Like I said, we didn't really get into using anything else, to be honest. I personally found out about activeCollab when I was doing work for another agency before I decided to put all my efforts into my own business. They used activeCollab, and I couldn't imagine doing things any other way.

How did activeCollab help you improve your team's collaboration? What are the tools you use the most? If you were asked to pick one "killer feature" which one would it be?

Even with our dudes in-house, activeCollab is a must. We tend to have no less than 20 projects active at any given time, so trying to manage those projects and figure out what's going on would be hell for any project manager. For us, Tickets are the killer feature that we don't know how we lived without. Back in the days of 0.7.x, we just used annoyingly long task lists and appended ridiculous comments to each item in the list. It was a mess. Now we just open up a ticket for every single item so we can fully discuss and break down into subtasks as needed.

What do coworkers think? How have they adjusted to activeCollab?

Basically, our company would implode without it. Brains would explode, and I would go insane. More than I am now.

Thank you for your time! Anything you have to add?

I look forward to continue watching the growth of the project, and I hope that my suggestions and feedback can help mold activeCollab into the absolute best project collaboration tool on the market. The price is a no brainer for anyone who actually has projects to manage, and the features are over the top. I wouldn't trade her in for anything!