Skylight is as suite of web-based tools that aim to “simplify your business life.” It offers Project Management, Booking, Task Management, Simple CRM, Email and Calls, and stores files and documents for you. The goal for Skylight is to become “the best web app there is for managing business and teams using latest web technologies.”
The Skylight Dashboard gives you a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on with your business. It includes access to just about every facet of the system all in one place. From the dashboard, you can tell what projects you have, what milestones are nearby, and what tasks your team needs to complete to reach them.
Each of the items on the dashboard can be accessed from the main menu to drill down and get more details. These include:
- Projects – general items that need to be completed
- Contacts – people and companies you work with
- Resources – things like equipment and conference rooms
- Tasks – track the specifics of what you need to do and how long each will take
- Files – any related files you have uploaded (a free account gives you 2GB of storage)
- Rates – keep track of how much your spending/billing
- Accounts – includes Invoices, Quotes, and Purchase Orders
- Reports – generate reports from your data to get different perspectives on your success
Skylight integrates with your existing email account to send and receive emails. You can also integrate your Skylight tasks with your existing Google or iCal calendar. Interestingly, at a time when just about every service integrates with social media, Skylight offers no such features. You are still able to collaborate with your team and your customers/clients by giving them access to the system at specified security levels.
In addition to letting you send emails, you can make calls from Skylight via Skype. Upload and organize your files by project, contact, or resource. Storage in the cloud makes your files accessible wherever you are. Every item that you create in Skylight, including uploaded files, can be tagged to help in keeping things together.
Skylight is entering a crowded space. There are a plethora of web applications that aim to help with team collaboration and project management. Skylight may be able to stand out from these with their billing and resource management features. Business collaboration is nice, but invoicing and getting paid for your work is even better and not many applications currently offer a good mix of both.