Posts tagged collaboration

Stixy, free-form collaboration and online sharing service

4 years ago

by Benedict Herold in web 2.0

Stixy provides a new free-form approach to collaborate most of the day to date contents online with your friends, colleagues and family. Along with collaboration Stixy also provides online file sharing.

Stixy is an online bulletin board application that features Stixyboard, a free-form drag ‘n drop bulletin board. Stixyboard is highly flexible and shareable web bulletin boards. You can invite more users to collaborate on your Stixyboard.

Stixyboard can be effectively used for multipurpose like creating a to-do list, planner, calendar, sharing photo album, sharing files and notes. These boards created can be utilized for individual or group purpose.

Stixyboard Screen shot

Key Advantages

Easy to use, this application can be operated easily by any level of computer user.
Very rich GUI, the user interface is really amazing.
Stixyboard can be either private or public (with or w/o authentication)
There is no limitation of Stixyboard currently that means you can share huge volume of files with your friends. They have only 10 MB per file limit on files.

Setbacks

No full screen support. For any rich Internet application full screen mode is required for desktop like operation.
Question on scalability: I’m sure they much have designed the application with scalability in mind but there was a little question during my test initially. The application didn’t respond and lost data when I was trying to collaborate a Stixyboard from two different systems at the same time.

Improvements

Stixy would have a huge success if they can create a rich application for everyone’s daily use. I inferred following points would add more values to the Stixy, which is currently in beta.

Stixy can support more content types including video and music.
Stixy need to have a web-based drop zone to drop the files that need to be added to the Stixyboard.
Stixy would need a preview tool for viewing documents, playing music and videos etc. Just for the shake of previewing a Stixyboard I won’t prefer to download the entire content to my local.
Stixy need to collaborate with other online services to create more sophisticated and rich application. My personal favorite would be adding Picnik for image editing.
Stixy also need to syndicate the Stixyboard update so that users can keep track of their related Stixyboard.

Bottom-line, Stixy is currently in beta; I expect more functionality to be added to Stixy in near future to make it rich Internet application.

Have you tried Stixy? If so what is your feedback?

CatalystOffice, small office productivity web suite

4 years ago

by Benedict Herold in reviews, web 2.0

CatalystWeb features small business software known as Catalyst Office on web. CatalystOffice is an integrated suite of productivity software such as email, document sharing calendar, task, contact etc.; Catalyst Office is a web application that gives you desktop like feel.

CatalystWeb has been officially launched a week back; you can catch more release and background information about CatalystOffice at Catalyst launch blog. Catalyst Office has been designed not to include the drawbacks of popular office application such has Microsoft Outlook.

Bob Mathew, CEO of CatalystWeb has been working on this small business software for last 3 year to overcome his frustration experienced with Microsoft product in his former company. Bob Mathew is the first CEO who gave his cell phone number to the user.

Features

Catalyst Office provides more sophisticated features that included corporate wide instant messaging and others mentioned below.

Corporate Email; access to the company wide email.
Document Management; manage your documents with easy permission settings.
Calendar; share your calendar across the company and find other calendar features.
Contact Management; manage you’re contact list and easy import / export.
Task; easily set the tasks and reminder.
Notes; user it just like a Jot pad.
Journa; easy to journal your entries.

Key Advantages

CatalystOffice provides very-very simple to use administrative panel. You really don’t have to hire an administrator.
The user interface is simple and well designed. Anyone who previously used Outlook can quickly run through it.
CatalystOffice can be accessed from anywhere via browser. You don’t have to pay for individual licenses. Just have to pay only for the space. No extra penny for processor and memory.
CatalystOffice is hosted at CatalystWeb server, which has scheduled daily backups and 24/7 monitoring for technical issues.
There are much more functionality associated with CatalystOffice as well like user profiles, email template and so on.

Setbacks

CatalystWeb works only with Firefox 2 and Windows XP / VISTA which is great drawback when it comes to Web platform.
No support for customizable domains. The application can only be hosted at CatalystWeb server.

Bottom-line, CatalystOffice suits pretty much the needs of every small entrepreneurial office that has much budget constraints. If you like to try CatalystOffice sign up for their 30-day full free trial today.

This is a sponsored post.

catalyst collaboration office 2.0 productivity sponsored web 2.0

Top 5 open source Wiki engines

4 years ago

by Benedict Herold in open source

A Wiki is a website which visitors can modify. Wikis are composed of web pages you can write on, enabling fast and easy collaboration

Why Wiki?

This is very commonly asked and answered question. But here is the few uses which I feel about a Wiki.

Educational: It can be used as instrumental tool for building knowledge management system. Wiki is also been used as Text books in few educational institutions.

Collaboration: It allows the project team to collaborate on any specific task / idea.

Documentation: It can be used for the documentation purpose of any project. Draft version of document can be developed greatly using Wiki features.

Personal: It can be used for personal note taking purpose and book marking.

Top 5 -

Here is the list of popular open source Wiki engines. This list is not complied in chronological order according to their popularity.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is most popular and holds the crown amongst the list. MediaWiki free web based software Wiki engine that was originally written for Wikipedia. MediaWiki is been adopted by several corporate and institutions as their internal knowledge management system. MediaWiki is written in PHP language and supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL RDBMS.

TWiki

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, secure, yet simple web-based collaboration platform. TWiki can be used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base or any other groupware tool on either an intranet or on the Internet. This Wiki is been mostly used by lot of enterprise including Yahoo and others. TWiki is written in PERL.

PmWiki

PmWiki is a free wiki-based system for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites. PmWiki pages look and act like normal web pages, except they can be edited or new pages can be added. Page editing can be left open to the public or restricted to small groups of authors. PmWiki works over text file and is written in PHP.

DokuWiki

DokuWiki is simple and lightweight Wiki engine. The administration option is very simple and comes with one click installation. DokuWiki is highly customizable with your current website theme. DokuWiki is written in PHP and works on small text file. DokuWiki is my personal favorite since it keeps everything simple!

MoinMoinWiki

MoinMoinWiki is a web application for making large database of knowledge basing. It produces nice structured information with feature of expansion information in cooperation manner with appropriate use it is power full content database. Alternatively, desktop edition of the Wiki is also available. It uses flat file for storing the information.