Online project management systems work when everyone is on board. Most are lonely places because team members avoid using them. There’s always a foreign URL to remember and a fear of sensitive data floating around cyberspace.

Allay those fears by using the ActiveCollab project management system. ActiveCollab can be integrated with your current website and styled to blend seamlessly with your company’s visual identity. You retain full control of your data because the platform and files are hosted on your server. You can even integrate plugins to introduce additional functionality and tailor the look and feel of the system to your needs.

ActiveCollab comes with the standard project management fare- file management, project templates, discussions, milestones, and checklists. The Small Business package runs $199/year (with a a free year of support), while the Corporate package runs $399 and includes time-tracking tools and calendars. Both packages allow you full access over permission levels and the ability to assign tasks to individual team members and set urgency levels.

A limited demo is available for free on the ActiveCollab website (a more advanced, hosted trial will set you back $10). Give it a test drive. You may find that managing your project management system is easier when it’s on home turf.

What’s the most important marketing decision you’ll ever make? Your brand name. And for that reason, naming is one of the toughest jobs you’ll ever have. Good thing that crowd-sourcing is now available to make it a little bit easier.

You can just turn to namethis, an online naming and decision-making platform from a company called Kluster. Namethis helps companies find 3 market-ready names for their product or service. Each competition costs $99 dollars (mostly compensation for the winners) and lasts 48 hours.

To enter, simply create an account with Kluster and post a short blurb about your product and business. Kluster then invites its community members to submit a name or invest “watts” in names that are or have already been thrown in the hat. Upon sign-up, all Kluster members earn 1000 free watts, which can be distributed over several competitions or (if you are feeling lucky) invested in a single idea.

This model is very similar to logo and web design service, 99Designs, which we discussed in Take that- luftballoons. Both crowd-sourcing platforms offer ideas and inspiration in a pinch and won’t eat into your marketing budget. You may be surprised by what the crowd has in store for your new product.

If you’re selling, you realize that you spend much of your time creating and reviewing presentations. So why are we all still wrestling with creating things on the desktop and then moving them to the web?

Now you can create and sell online, with 280Slides - a web-based presentation solution from 280North. It combines the look and functionality of Apple’s Keynote with the accessibility and price tag of Google Docs (free!). Now, anyone can create and share professional-grade presentations directly in their web browser- even PowerPoint amateurs and Keynote-phobes.

280Slides features a user-friendly toolbar, that lets you add text, shapes, images, and movies to your document. That’s right, movies. Users have the ability to add images and video directly from the web. And it’s ridiculously easy to do. Click on the pictures icon in the toolbar and a small, media browser pops up. From here, you can search the Google image directory and top Flickr hits or type the url in directly. Peruse movie results from YouTube and Vimeo, or upload your own media to the library.

Once your document is finished and saved, you can share it with the world. Email it to a friend or embed in a website. Go public and publish on SlideShare (another online presentation resource) or take it all offline and download your presentation in a PowerPoint format.

As with so many web-based applications, we wonder how we ever got things done before their existence. Trying to manage and juggle multiple projects without a tool like Liquid Planner or 37 Signal’s Basecamp at our disposal would be a nightmare. But, face it, we are all greedy and want more- more functionality, better interfaces, and the ability to prioritize.

So who does all this? Well, actually, WhoDoes does. WhoDoes2.0 is the latest version of of the collaborative project management system from GotThingsDone.com. Like its peers, WhoDoes lets you organize and manage the myriad of activities, dates, and people connected to a project. But WhoDoes has a few more tricks up its sleeve:

• My Workspace is the ultimate to-do list, providing a daily overview of your tasks and deliverables, with a distributional activities calendar that gives you long-term project visibility.

• The Fast Planning feature will help you keep your project on track. This simple drag-and-drop assignment system lets you assign due dates and priority levels to each individual task.

• No more runaway budgets! WhoDoes lets you put billable time restraints on the whole project or specific tasks, so you know exactly where your budget stands as team members enter time against it.

With reasonable monthly fees and a free 30-day trial, WhoDoes offers plan levels and packages for everyone. If you are looking for a project solution, try it on for size.

The saddest place on the web? The beautifully styled but totally empty forum. It’s the stark reminder that so often, if you build it, they won’t come.

Now you have an option - try kick-starting your site discussion forum with a paid posting service like ForumsFirst. Their stable of professional writers produce blog commentary and discussion threads on-demand and tailor-made to your website or blog. ForumsFirst offers a variety of reasonable content packages. For those who want to dip their toes in water, a trial blog package only costs $5. You get 12 comments, a minimum of 40 words each, from two registered users. Ready to dive in? The Jumbo package will set you back $225 for 750 comments, from 10-12 registered users, over the course of 15 weeks.

ForumsFirst also offers bookmarking services. For $20, they will add your website or blog to del.ic.ious and other top bookmarking sites. Search engines like Google and Yahoo rely on social bookmarking sites for their vast catalog of user-approved urls. In other words, the more links your site has on del.ic.ious, the better your site will rank in organic search.

If your visitors currently hear crickets when they visit your forum, here’s how to get the party started.

As we discussed in Talk amongst yourselves, there are a number of web-based tools to help you create a dialog with your customers or readers. However, some companies (and bloggers) would rather these conversations take place on home turf. And who can blame them?

Thanks to Yedda’s suite of blogger widgets, you can turn your website or blog into an open forum. Like Yahoo Answers, Yedda leverages the wisdom of crowds in a simple Q&A platform. The twist here is that Yedda understands the most important questions and answers come from your own audience.

The Profile Widget streams all your personal Yedda Q&A’s on your site, letting you share your knowledge directly with your readers, while the FAQ Widget posts pre-selected frequently asked questions and answers from the Yedda community. With the Ask A Question Widget, your readers can ask and answer questions on any topic. Yedda publishes the questions on Yedda.com and rewards you with a link back to your site.

So whether you are looking to add dynamic content to your site or looking for a free tool to help increase your site traffic, Yedda can be a good answer.

We all know the sad truth. No matter how much planning you go through, most project plans are at best inaccurate. The missing link? No one really knows how long it takes to do anything.

However, they usually can give a more accurate range. That’s the secret behind Liquid Planner. It’s a new, web-based project management tool. The big difference is that it lets you incorporate ranges and confidence levels, leading to a project plan that provides a best case and a worst case scenario. In fact, the system includes a feature that calculates the probability that individual tasks and the overall project will be completed by various dates. In this way, you can manage up and down at the same time and stop plugging in a fudge factor (that no doubt leads to a lot of anxiety).

In other words, as a project manager, you have a much better sense of when all of the pieces will come together.

For small teams (3 or fewer), it’s free. Larger groups will pay $35/month/user. While it’s not cheap, it may help save your skin.

Even though we all know about webinars, it seems that we’re forever in the position of asking people to react to creative or marketing output. And, one thing everyone agrees on - sending email attachments is definitely not the best way.

Now there’s a very fast and free option called Backboard. It’s the story that we all know - sign up and then either point to or upload an image to review. Then send a note to people so you can get their feedback - essentially comments that sit at the bottom of the page. Feel the need to see an example up close and personal, here’s a Backboard we created for the digital scientists site. Feel free to add your thoughts.

This is a great, fast, free way to get more feedback on your marketing creative. Before you serve up something to your superiors for review, why not use this tool to gather a bit more perspective?

Despite the success of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its forceful commentary about the importance of creating a conversation with your customer, not everyone got the message. We all still run into companies who cause us heartburn. It might help to open up the conversation beyond the heavily scripted call center.

One way to do that is with Get Satisfaction. This system was developed to help with problem solving, promote sharing, and build up customer relationships. This service is a lot like a customer support board, but it’s a lot more free form. Users visit and pose questions or concerns about a company’s products or services. Then either the company or just anybody can answer. If it sounds familiar, it’s sort of a customer-focused version of Yahoo! Answers (that we discussed in Talk Amongst Yourselves). If you’re looking for a way to engage with customers outside of traditional challenges, here’s an easy way to do so.

Aren’t you wondering what your customers are asking about?

Try inviting a small number of customers to review your marketing tactics using Stixy. It’s a free, web-based bulletin board that that makes sharing photos and notes a snap. Stixy houses a number of widgets in a single, browser-based desktop and is extremely easy to use. Click on “new stixyboard” to get started, then choose the widget (notes, photos, documents, or todo’s) you want to use in the project space. There are no layout restrictions, you can drag and drop just about anything. You can simply upload an image of one of your products, whether it’s a sandwich or a motorcycle. Then, just invite a few customers to review.

The classic problem in marketing research is figuring out what questions to ask. This vehicle lets you give your customers an unstructured way to think about or react to an existing or new product. Don’t worry, your customers won’t bite.

When it comes to choosing a brand identity (logo), you may find that your choices are limited by the imagination of the agency or graphic designer you have hired. On the web, however, it’s the land of plenty.

Try 99designs, a service that provides a quick and cost-effective way to sample many, many creative options and directions, before you commit to one. Say you need a new logo. You can use this site to launch a contest with your design requirements, set a prize amount, and sit back and watch the submissions pour in. Once you choose your winner and payment is complete, you own all the rights to the design. In other words, if you like the winning concept, but don’t want to commit to the design, it is yours to develop further.

99designs charges $39 to host the contest and sets reasonable guidelines for prize amounts (e.g. $100 for a logo, $200 for a webpage with html code). Contest holders are required to leave feedback on designs, a practice that helps participants gauge their skills and encourages them to submit more frequently.

Whether your looking for options or an inspiration, 99designs connects you to a community of designers and offers an affordable option for your a-la-carte creative needs.

The struggle to collaborate continues. You want to create a place to share, but you don’t want to sacrifice control. How do you open up the potential for sharing, without letting the inmates run the asylum?

Now you have another option with Google Sites. This offering is the newest element of functionality from the online office toolset called Google Apps (that we mentioned in Close the loop). This application makes it easy to create a shared website, so you can provide people with up-to-date access to information. You can invite team members to add file attachments, incorporate information from other Google applications (documents, calendar, videos, images) and also create new content. What’s really different here is that this tool puts basic site development into the hands of just about anyone. if you can manage MS Word or MS Powerpoint, then you can use this tool to create sites and then publish them either to your intranet or to the web.

You should be happy to hear that usage options range from free to $50 / year, depending on your level in Google Apps. If you’re looking to create a small site for your team that you want to let everyone use and edit - here’s an interesting option.