At the Enterprise 2.0 conference today in San Francisco, PBworks (formerly PBwiki, see our previous coverage here) announced that it is adding built-in, real-time collaboration tools to its wiki software. The new suite of tools will include in-app IM, Live Notifications of changes to an organization’s workspaces, Live Editing of documents, and Voice Collaboration.
The planned changes should make collaboration using PBworks much easier and faster, with less need to rely on external services. For example, imagine that you’re working on a document and you’d like some input from your team. You could use the built-in IM tool to see who’s online, direct them to the page, start a Live Editing session (which lets them see any changes you make to the document in real time), and even set up an ad hoc conference call using the Voice Collaboration component.
IM Collaboration, Live Notifications, and Live Editing will be available for free to customers with Project Edition and Legal Edition plans beginning Nov. 17, while the Voice Collaboration component should be available in early 2010 (pricing hasn’t been set yet).
Would you use built-in voice chat/conference calling if it was added to your favorite collaboration suite, or would you continue to use an external conference calling app, like WebEx?
Some big news yesterday was the announcement of the Bing/Twitter/Facebook deals that will see the three services sharing info and working together in all kinds of interesting ways. One of those ways has now gone live, and it’s Microsoft’s Bing Twitter search. It looks a little like Twitter Search, only better, and much more broadly useful.
What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects. Read the rest of this entry »
Easy Projects.NET, a project management web app that Darrell liked when he reviewed it a couple of months ago, has added improved Gantt charting functionality. The new full-screen “Interactive Gantt” interface is reminiscent of desktop PM apps like Microsoft Project and should make it easier to track project progress. It should also make it much faster to create and edit tasks on the fly, with drag-and-drop task scheduling, resource planning and activity assignments.
It’s good to see a web app vendor taking a step in this direction and making its tool more suitable for “serious” PM work. Most project management web apps don’t have decent Gantt charting; it’s one of the reasons why I still prefer Microsoft Project for planning, and why many project management professionals say that most PM web apps are not really project management tools at all.
If you’d like to try Easy Projects.NET Interactive Gantt charts, a 15-day free trial is available.
Have you tried Easy Projects.NET? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Statistics from the exo.performance.network indicate that over half of computer users (50.6 percent) are now using the Firefox browser, InfoWorld reports. Despite this, Internet Explorer is still widely used, with 84 percent of users still turning to it “regularly.”
These numbers indicate that a large number of people use more than one browser. This is hardly surprising, given the addition of newer browsers like Google Chrome and Safari for Windows, and the recent upgrade of Opera.
It’s evident that web designers and developers will continue to need to support multiple browsers, and while modern browsers are generally more compatible than they have been in the past, developers will need to plan testing of their applications accordingly.
Which browsers do you test your sites for?
It seems to be new Google features discovery week, with new search parameters for searching the web in real time, and now a Labs feature called Fast Flip making an appearance. Fast Flip is a visual browser of online publications, designed to give you a quick snapshot of what’s being blogged and talked about at many major news sources at a glance.
If you’re looking to take the pulse of the web at any given moment (and you don’t want the static or excess sensationalism that goes along with using Twitter), Google Fast Flip is as good a place as any to start. It sort of feels like a concise, pre-filtered Alltop that provides a macro level view of some of the web’s most influential and respectable news sources. Read the rest of this entry »
Like many other Google products, Google Reader has built-in keyboard shortcuts. Learning these shortcuts can save you lots of time, as you don’t have to take your hands from the keyboard and can perform tasks faster.
Google Reader has an extensive list of available shortcuts. It would take quite a bit of effort to learn how to use them all, so in this post I’m just going to share those that I use every day to make trawling through my feeds a little bit faster. Read the rest of this entry »
I love technology, but not when it comes to switching PCs — moving all the data and applications from one Windows machine to another is not always as easy as it could be.
I thought I’d share some tips gleaned from my latest move to a new desktop. My way isn’t necessary the best way, but it may give you some ideas when it comes time for you to make the switch. Here are the steps that I took.
Read the rest of this entry »
I still take it as a personal affront that Mac users have had to wait so long for a usable build of Google Chrome. Since I haven’t done any Windows-related work in a good while now, running Chrome was really my only reason for using any kind of OS virtualization. I barely even have cause to open MS Word anymore.
Finally, as Simon mentioned last week, we Apple fans have got a Chrome build near enough completion to get worked up about. It isn’t anywhere near a proper final build, but it does work well enough that I felt comfortable using it to compose this piece. It’s good enough for most web work that doesn’t involve using Flash (which is almost all of it, in my case, I’m realizing). Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
