Element Software
Melbourne, Victoria - All around the world, companies in a diverse range of industries are gaining benefits from their adoption of the Australian-developed Web-based project and task management software solution that they use every day, Copper.
The brainchild of a group of designers seeking to improve the management of collaborative projects, Copper has found enormous favour in over 50 countries with organisations such as Cisco, Apple, Ogilvy Advertising, Pennsylvania State University and the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. In 2001 the group established Element Software, a virtual team of developers and designers, headed by CEO Ben Prendergast.
I'm a PC. No. Now I'm a Mac
For Prendergast, managing a virtual team brings with it a somewhat unique set of challenges, not least of which is dealing with a variety of platforms in use by team members. Yet with the passage of time - and the quickly apparent benefits of a Mac platform - it is a challenge that has essentially disappeared with little effort. "When we started the company, we had designers using Mac but most of the developers were using PCs running Microsoft Windows," Prendergast explains. "Given that Copper's design and development tools - Dreamweaver and Photoshop - are available for both platforms, we decided that rather than dictate a standard platform, we'd adopt a wait-and-see approach."
The result of that approach was a gradual and voluntary adoption of Macs by most of the developers. "Team members simply discovered for themselves that the tools they needed to develop and maintain Copper work better in the Mac OS X environment," Prendergast states. "In general, these are tech-savvy people who are quick to recognise the benefits of tools and technologies; and the Mac's inherent ability to operate as a combined design and development environment was self-evident to them."
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