[1]Halifax company Upstart Industries [1] has launched Vantage: A Social Approach to Project Management [2]. Vantage is an online, subscription-based (SaaS) application which integrates project and portfolio management capabilities with enterprise social media. You can try it free for 30 days.
Upstart co-founder Kelly Kazimer notes, “Anyone who has managed or participated in a project understands the challenges of maintaining focus on project goals, and ensuring that every project team member is on the same page. These challenges are often further compounded by adopting project tools at the 
[3]project level, which creates information and communication silos within the organization. We created Vantage specifically to tackle these problems head on.”
Vantage provides a collaborative web-space for project teams to manage, work with, and share projects. Tasks, resources, budgets, schedules, project plans, issues, risks can all be managed on a per project basis, using only a web browser. Beyond individual project management, Vantage provides you with an organizational view of all of your projects and resources. Every project’s status and health can be viewed on a single page; every resource’s allocation & participation can be viewed across all projects; every resource can view an integrated task list of their assignments from all of their projects.
Vantage uses its own secured social media channel, VantagePoint, to source not only user-generated content but also project activity within one central activity steam. When a schedule is published, a new resource added, or a new task assigned, VantagePoint notifies the team. At the same time, team members can use VantagePoint to update statuses, request approvals, seek consensus, flag issues, identify risks, and work together to achieve goals.
Kelly Kazimer explains, “As a solution, we created Vantage to support what we feel are the cornerstones of project success: communication, collaboration, visibility, and accountability. As a tool, we designed Vantage to be a business application that’s as easy to use as the tools we use every day as consumers. Producing and consuming information has never been easier. And we applied those principles and expectations to Vantage.”
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G7-cw0UiDE]