The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community.

I’m sure that you’ve been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best of intentions, activity loses steam after the event is over, and nothing much gets done. It’s too early yet to judge the long-term effectiveness of this particular event, but I’m optimistic that it will make more of a difference than many such gatherings.

The electronic component of the event was relatively simple. We created a content-managed web site that would act as the hub for the many places that participants would post their contributions and reflections. We didn’t require participants to use a specific CMS tool (although they were welcome to use ours). Instead, before, during and after the conference, participants were encouraged to use existing technologies with which they were familiar to document their thoughts, and we then created links to their contributions.

Before the Event

The web site went live a couple of weeks before the event began. By that time, event announcements and registration had already been posted to a section on the sponsoring organization’s web site. Participants had been asked to interview another attendee as a “get-to-know-you” exercise. The results were to have been posted, but very few did so — I suspect because the CMS used by the sponsoring organization has a significant learning curve.

In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.

During the Event

The venue at our local university had limited wired connectivity, but it was sufficient for a video stream, an audio stream, and the web updates that I was doing. The video stream worked fine; the audio stream was less successful because the university had blocked the ports we needed. For the same reason, we had to use a MiFi connection to use FTP. Thankfully, this did not affect access to our CMS.

Participants were able to connect using Wi-Fi, which worked well, aside from some issues with entering passwords. I’m guessing that perhaps fifty people were connected at any one time.

The event web site included the following, all of which was updated frequently:

• An attendee list, with links to participants’ web sites and Twitter feeds.
• The event agenda. Since the event was an “un-conference” using the “open space” approach, much of the agenda was developed on the spot by attendees.
• A Twitter statuses JavaScript badge showing posts from the event. These tweets were mostly done by me on behalf of event organizers, but other committee members also tweeted through the conference account.
• A Twitter search widget showing a real-time feed of all posts using the conference hashtag. A full-screen version of this widget was projected in the room where most discussions took place, and it proved very popular.
• A link to a Twapperkeeper archive of the Twitter hashtag feed.
• A Facebook fan box linking to the event’s Facebook page.
• A Flickr badge and links to tagged photos and videos. Flipcharts and graphs were scanned or photographed, then posted to Flickr and to the web site as JPGs and PDFs. We also put up a Picasa link at the request of attendees, but it didn’t get used.
• A Ustream video feed. Video of many sessions was fed live into the site, then archived.
• A link to YouTube search results tagged with the event’s tag.
• An audio feed. Podcasts of many sessions were made available later.
• Links to blogs of those attendees who were writing about the event.
• A wiki for allowing attendees to post notes from event sessions. We chose to use a wiki rather than giving all users access to the CMS, although I think that in future we might go the other way, as some found editing the wiki difficult.
• An RSS feed for tracking changes to all of the above.

After the Event

We had not created a LinkedIn group before the event. However, participants indicated that they wanted to have an electronic venue for continuing the discussion after the conference. We surveyed the room, and discovered that almost everyone was already a LinkedIn user. Since LinkedIn groups and subgroups can be created immediately, we chose to use that service. We could have selected another group conversation service, though, and participants may move to more sophisticated collaborative tools as their discussions continue.

Planning and Setup

If you are ever called upon to provide this sort of support to an event, it can be fun and educational. Here are some tips to make things go smoothly.

• Get involved with the planning committee as soon as possible, and get an event-specific web site posted early.
• Agree on the hashtag for the event, and publicize it.
• Coordinate with the meeting venue to make sure that it has adequate power and bandwidth (both wired and Wi-Fi), and that it does not block ports.
• Plan to bring your own equipment if possible, or make sure that you have everything you’ll need.
• Set up a “tech table” in a convenient location.
• Have a group of volunteers who can cover the full event.
• Give yourself lots of time for setup and breakdown.
• Have a dedicated laptop and projector for displaying the Twitter hashtag feed — participants will love it.
• Consider what you’ll need in the way of cameras, scanners and printers. We had them all, and they were handy to have, but we could probably have done without them.

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

How do you use social media and the web for events?

Images by Flickr users Choconancy1 and hajush

e-tipi

“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”

It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi.

e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a workspace in which ideas can be born and explored. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. All of the ideas center around a central “challenge,” which the main problem or purpose of the tipi. Think of a challenge like a big picture problem that requires a multi-parted and multi-staged solution.

Along with your tipi page, you also get a unique email address that contributors can send their ideas to directly, for quickly adding to the tipi’s repository. You can also follow your tipi on Twitter, the stream for which is automatically updated with information of your choosing. I like both of these tie-ins, because they make e-tipi feel more connected with other networks, making it much more accessible, which is something I like in idea generation tools.

You can also export your data at any time as either XML or HTML, which makes it easy to plug into other tools, including database management software. It’s a nice way to help you organize the raw information you produce using e-tipi’s tools. A messy free-for-all is a good way to generate creative thought, but it may not be the best storage solution for more polished ideas.

Ideas are listed on their own separate page, and you can sort them by activity and date. Each idea listed shows votes for or against, total views, and the number of comments users have posted about each. You also get the idea’s title, its creator, any tags that may have been applied, and the status, if the idea has one. For each idea, an administrator can set the status to tell others how far along the process intis, using labels like “Accepted,” “Started,” etc. You can also filter your ideas list by keyword to narrow your search.

Each idea page looks a little like a Digg article page, complete with the text of the idea in question and comments made by other users underneath. You also get to see potentially related ideas listed at the bottom of the description page.

Other nice features of e-tipi include a tag cloud, and a member display, in which you can view a user’s profile information, and access information like how many ideas they’ve contributed to, including comments and voting, and how many documents they’ve contributed. You can also highlight certain areas in a Spotlight menu for quick access.

Overall, e-tipi is a very rough-cut tool, when measured against others I’ve tried in the past. It’s not exactly easy on the eyes, and at times it can even seem disorganized. Despite that sense of mess, or perhaps because of it, e-tipi does feel like something that could well operate as fertile ground for the generation and refinement of ideas. I like the sense of freedom inherent in the site, and the potential for unstructured, loose collaboration with a wide number of viewers.

Do you use a web app for idea generation and refinement? Which one?

Over on the OStatic blog

Like many other wiki tools, Luminotes collects a series of linked notes, each with a unique title. To make a new note, you just click on the “+” button (at the top of the toolbar, at left in the screenshot above). You can link notes to each other using the “Link” button on the toolbar, and then there are standard formatting buttons that let you do everything from bolding text to creating bulleted and numbered lists within notes. Wikis are searchable, and you can import and export content to and from them.

There is a complete user guide for Luminotes found here, but I doubt that many users will need the guide. Everything is implemented through a WYSIWYG interface in the application, so that it feels like using Word or any other common word processor. There is no tricky markup language to or wrestle with.

Luminotes also has a blog, which discusses new features and the like. There is a Windows version and a Linux version, but Luminotes doesn’t work with every browser. I couldn’t get it to work in Opera, for example. It supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. You can do the download and installation in about two minutes.

You can either work online or offline with Luminotes, and can store it and run it from a USB thumb drive. If you decide to stop using Luminotes but want to keep your content, you can export your notes to a web page or to a CSV file to store in a spreadsheet. This application is very straightforward and could be a good way to manage projects among collaborators, or personal projects.

What note-taking tool do you use?

Revizr is a new app that combines wiki elements with change tracking features that preserves the integrity of your original document, so you can see exactly what your collaborators have added (or taken away) from your copy. And it does so in an app that’s so easy to use, you’re actually using it the moment you visit its homepage for the first time. In order to manipulate your own documents, and work together with others, you will have to sign up, but if you’re just looking for a taste of what Revizr can do before you enroll, the trial is the site itself.

If you want to dig a little deeper, sign-up is quick, free and easy. Just pick a username, enter a password and an email address, and you’re ready to go. Alternatively, you can sign in using your OpenID credentials (including Yahoo and Gmail email addresses) and skip registration that way. Once logged in, you’ll have access to stored documents and be able to upload new ones. Revizr works with .doc/.docx, .odt, .rtf, HTML and .txt files. You can also cut and paste or compose a brand-new document using Revizr’s built-in word processor, which allows graphics, tables and pretty much anything else you’d expect a word processor to be able to handle. For each document, you can set an access policy that allows you to specify who can view and make changes to the work in question. There are three options, which include people who already have access (who could be no one besides yourself), people who have the protected link (which you can generate and distribute from the permissions page), or anyone on the Internet. (There could be some creative potential with that option, maybe.) You can also set levels of access for new users, and allow them to see edits done by others, check previous versions, and even control content like an administrator.

What I like best about Revizr’s user control system is that it is incredibly simple, and yet very powerful, if you need it to be. There are only six options total, in two categories, and yet I can’t think of anything I’d add or change.

Users can also opt to “follow” documents, which sounds like (and probably is) a term borrowed from Twitter. All it really means is that if anyone makes changes to documents you’re following, you’ll receive email notifications of what’s been done. By default, you’ll automatically follow changes to any document you upload or create yourself. This is another feature I really appreciate. It’s something that should be a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how often something like this isn’t included. Working with only one other person, the need for it isn’t particularly great, but if you have a larger group, you risk some people missing entire versions without it. Possibly Revizr’s weakest point is how it handles the actual editing itself. I tested it out by making some changes to my own document as an anonymous user while logged out, and I found the experience frustrating. It’s unclear where the cursor is. There are three icons (one  to insert text, one for commenting, and one for inserting a paragraph) but the choice of which to click isn’t very intuitive. Selecting and removing text works well enough, though, if that’s all you want to do.

Viewing of revisions could also have been better executed, in my opinion. Deleted text is represented as a strikeout, which works, but text additions are displayed in the margin with an arrow indicating where they fit in. It’s clumsy and hard to read, especially when keeping the additions in the main body of the document wouldn’t seem to have been that difficult.

As a free tool, Revizr gets the job done and has some nice backend features. Because of the limitations of the editor and change display, I wouldn’t personally go in for the paid versions, which start at $29 per month and range up to $99.

Have you tried Revizr? Did you find working with the editor frustrating?

A new web app called NotePub seems to be devised around the principle that, for computerized note-taking to be as useful as the paper kind, it should also be as simple and hassle-free. Accordingly, NotePub is built around the concept of an easy-to-edit wiki.

Initially, I mistook simple for confusing, which is never really a good sign. NotePub immediately presents you with a field for typing, but also a navigation bar on the right. I clicked “Home”, thinking it would lead to some more explanation or a proper launch page, but was greeted only with what you see in the above screen shot. The “Home” page is customized depending on your login, and initially every visitor is logged in as “Anonymous”, with access to that profile and that home page, and any notes published under the “Anonymous” account.

After I figured that out, it took me another few minutes to figure out how to register, which I managed to find via the “Help” link in the navigation menu. Even then, clicking the link brought me to an anchor about halfway down the help page, so I had to scroll up to locate what I was looking for. Registration, it turns out, is simple. Just type your name in the identification field attached to any text entry box at the bottom of any page, and you will be prompted for your password, if you already have an account. If you don’t have an account, and the name you chose is available, you’ll be prompted to set one.

Once signed in, clicking the “Home” link will bring you to a list of your own notes, which is obviously much more useful. Included in your list of notes are the NotePub help notes, to show you how you might use the site, including tips for using NotePub at school, or on your mobile phone. From here, you can see that NotePub automatically scrolls any page to the latest addition, which is why I was finding navigation so bizarre before. It just isn’t the type of browsing I’m used to.

Despite all the failings I’ve pointed out above, there are some things about NotePub that could prove invaluable to a web worker, depending on your specific needs. The first is quick and easy access.  I mentioned above how confusing the interface was initially, but once I figured it out, it’s a snap. You can even bookmark a quick link which allows you to go directly to your notes and compose new ones without logging in. Not very secure, but definitely a plus if you just want to jot down someone’s number so you don’t forget. Plus you can drag and drop files into the text editor field to save them for later.

NotePub also has a frequent autosave feature so you won’t ever lose much of your work due to connectivity issues or browser crashes. Hovering over notes will show you how old it is, if and how many times its been linked to, and give you the option to email it, share it on Facebook, move it, delete it, and more. Once you get to know it, the interface is robust, and admirable for its economy.

There’s also mobile access to NotePub via cell phone browser, which really adds to its usefulness for web workers. You can access a special, pared-down version of the site that provides the perfect means for an autosaved, on-the-run quick note via a Safari home screen bookmark on my iPhone that’s then accessible via my computer later.

NotePub is not a perfect solution by any means. The UI is rough, and a little untamed for my tastes, and sometimes things aren’t quite as intuitive as they could be. That said, it provides a lot of great functionality underneath that flawed form, which goes a long way towards excusing its various warts. I’m definitely hoping for more to come out of NotePub, but in the meantime, I’ll try to excuse its poor manners so long as it keeps working for me.

What do you use for notetaking?

Congratulations to Garvin and the Serendipity team for a fantastic 1.4 release of their wonderful blogging platform.

With the holidays here, and perhaps some free time available, jkOnTheRun points us to some Good Old Games for your netbook.

Slash7 shares a Jump Start Credit Card Processing Cheat Sheet – thanks Amy.

Andreas Gohr shows you how to Setup DokuWiki in <15 minutes.

Wayne Smallman tells us Why we need a blogging code of conduct. What do you think?

Cyn.in is an open source collaboration app, and as such only offers a portion of the functionality of Liferay, but those looking for a more pure collaboration platform, and not a full-fledged intranet, may find it more tailored to their specific needs.

Cyn.in is centralized software that collects all of your basic collaboration software, like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, etc. It also supports file sharing and repositories. I tried the live demo to get a sense of what Cyn.in has to offer, with a special focus on how it might compare to Liferay regarding my specific goal of using it to help organize and grow my collaborative writing blog.

The demo allows you to log in to an enterprise edition install of Cyn.in, using one of the dummy accounts they’ve set up for their demo corporations, Widgets Inc. Different accounts are attached to different levels of employee, from junior management to executives.

For my test run, I signed on using a Senior Managment account. Immediately, you’re greeted with a mind map which breaks down your company’s spaces and views. This map was an interactive flash element, which I found buggy and not necessarily intuitive. Cynapse does warn that performance might be unusual since many people could be logged on to the demo at the same time using the same accounts.

Underneath the mind map is a notification area, broken down into subsections. Here you can see all recent updates, your own items, view the boss’s blog and status log, and see recently active discussions. Overall, it feels a tad cluttered, but it’s a good snapshot of what’s going on across the company.

On the right-hand side of the screen, you have your personal control toolbar. From there, you can update your status, view/change your profile and preference, and log out of cyn.in. You can also subscribe to email notifications and view upcoming events. I’m still not entirely sure how the email subscription system works. It looks like you can subscribe to the content of whatever page you happen to be viewing, which, if true, would come in handy.

Creating spaces was easy enough. I created one called “Disaster Control”, to see what options were available. One nice feature was the ability to postpone the publication date of any particular space, so that you can plan project streams and lines of business that are not yet active beforehand, and have them go live automatically whenever others are meant to have access to them.

Building a wiki for the space was also not too much trouble, although I found it far less intuitive than Liferay’s interface. I had to create a new wiki page from the top menu in order to set a home page in the Disaster Recovery area. A simple link in the wiki tab would’ve made things a lot more clear.

Overall, Cyn.in seems like a fairly powerful tool, especially if your users are knowledgeable and experienced in customized enterprise collaboration software. It lacks the pick-up-and-play feel of Liferay, in my opinion, but does offer an SaaS option and an Enterprise license that takes all of the setup footwork out of the equation for you, if you’re looking to spend a good amount of cash. There’s also the free open source software, but you have to run it on your own server.

I’d recommend Cyn.in for consultants working with larger, established companies looking for an alternative to their current collaboration solution. DIYers on the other hand will probably want to stick with Liferay or something similar.

During my first go-around, I wasn’t savvy enough to take advantage of what was available, but with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve identified the following three categories of web apps that could make studying easier and more effective.

1. Wiki When I was teaching, students often expressed uncertainty about the validity of using information from Wikipedia in academic essays. Regardless of what you think about Wikipedia’s academic merits, a wiki itself is a very useful online collaborative tool.

With sites like PBWiki and Wikispaces offering free, easy-to-setup wikis for public use, it’s hard to argue against setting one up for a variety of study-related purposes. For example, the class I taught was Introductory Composition, or English writing for non-majors. A central component of the coursework was peer editing. Giving and receiving feedback happened in class, taking up a fair chunk of lecture time, which is fine considering it was the purpose of the course.

For those in other classes, time is not an available luxury. An informal wiki shared between classmates can provide a quick way to give and get feedback on writing projects that might not otherwise ever get read by fresh eyes.

If you’re already working full time, and taking courses on the side, finding available time to sit down and review your own or other people’s work is virtually impossible.  With a wiki you can pick at it at leisure, drop in and contribute whenever inspiration strikes, even if you’re working or at the office.

2. Forum Like a wiki, forums offer the chance for students to connect with one another and share valuable experience, advice and support. That can be especially important in distance ed. situations, which a lot of web workers often find themselves in. Online courses can lack an essential and motivating sense of community, which a forum can help to provide.

While not necessarily as collaborative as wikis, forums provide clearly threaded and demarcated discussions have their own advantages, especially if you’re dealing more with problem solving and less with writing and composition. Sometimes, courses provide their own forums, but these may not be conducive to true collaboration.

When setting up forums in the past, I’ve generally been lucky enough to have my own server space, where I would usually install a phpBB board. YaBB is another popular option if you go self-hosted, but although the boards are free, hosting is generally not. Forumotion.com offers users the ability to create a free customizable forum, and allows you to choose from a few different board software options.

3. Project Management Advanced students, experienced professionals, and those doing extensive group work will recognize the need to keep tabs on projects in detail. If the parts don’t come together, everyone loses, regardless of who’s to blame.

Online project management can help make sure everyone stays in the loop, or, if you’re working alone, can help make sure you don’t lose track of any of the various parts of complicated tasks. For this, there’s a variety of options, but considering the average student’s budget, the free alternatives are probably best, unless you’re already investing in a more expensive solution for your professional work. Goplan offers the ability to host two projects simultaneously with four users attached to each. It’s a barebones option, but it should fit the needs of most student uses, and it can scale up with a number of paid options to suit the needs of even the most seasoned web worker.

Of course, the effectiveness of these tools will always depend entirely on how they’re used. You might have a leg up if you’ve been working online for a while already, but repurposing the same tools for academic purposes isn’t necessarily as simple as doing what works professionally. Take the time to re-examine what you know and strike a proper balance, and your studies will benefit.

He spoke about the construction of a social network and how our networks have dense cores (strong ties) surrounded by dynamic peripheries (looser ties).

The core of an organization – such as the leadership team – tends to work closely together. They process information well and can usually make decisions quickly and effectively. The rest of the team, however, is the dynamic periphery and there is strength in these weak ties.

Traditional groupware serves the dense core, says Mayfield, never connecting to the weak ties. However, tapping into the periphery – the distributed team – can accelerate a project and a process cycle. Socialtext is meant to save the time individuals spend seeking information or the right people with the information or skills they need to get a job done.

The traditional way of communicating has been email back and forth with attached files. Many groupware products try to address this disorganized method of communications amongst many, however, the tools are often rigid with a top down structure.

Socialtext 3.0, which debuted at the end of September, is based on a blend of the wiki and the blog.

Every person who is a member of an organization’s Socialtext account gets their own dashboard – or personal “homepage” – where they can embed and arrange via drag and drop both work and personal information, images, and widgets containing video, audio, slides, and any other content they want to display.

Why a homepage for a worker with both professional and personal information? Mayfield believes in the value of an individual displaying their (appropriate) personal interests as well as their work because collaboration is between people. Knowing more about the people with whom you are working – especially when many workers are so far-flung and separated by more than just cubicle walls – can be key to building effective teams.

Work spaces on Socialtext work like both wikis and blogs, collaborative spaces where team members deposit and arrange content with a comments section for feedback from the team. All individuals’ names are hotlinked to their profile which is like a listing in a company directory with standard contact information but also links to their web site, blog, and social media accounts. Any team member can subscribe to the RSS feeds of other team members to keep track of their activities and input. People within an organization can add one another to their Socialtext social network based on common interests or skills and knowledge they need at their fingertips. Tags are used to help you and others label information and even one’s own profile to make it easier to find both.

Email is integrated into the wiki spaces of Socialtext – an email becomes the body of a wiki page. When a page is edited, that information is tracked and made public. When someone comments, everyone can share in that feedback.

Socialtext is meant to scale from a smaller group of 20-50 up to hundreds or thousands of people within a larger enterprise. The cost is $99/month for 20 people with unlimited networks and workspaces and they offer a free 14-day trial.

Mayfield pointed to several major publishing companies who are using Socialtext to map out editorial calendars, post story ideas, manage content as it develops, facilitate group assignments, and handle the day-to-day communications between workers.

Instead of focusing on files as the crux of collaboration, Socialtext focuses on the people who are creating the documents and sending the messages. You can follow who you want, connect with who you choose, and build your own organizational directory based on your needs and goals so you can tap into the right people to help you get the job done. Socialtext makes the dynamic periphery visible and helps everyone tap into the critical talent, knowledge and skill that may not be situated in the dense core.

As a web worker building a virtual team of independent consultants in several different states and time zones, I can see the value of a social networking, communications and collaboration platform like Socialtext although there are only eight of us at the moment.

Still, trying to determine who should be assigned to what client project and who is working on what assignment at any given time is a struggle, not to mention building connections between these independent workers.

Having an internal system where we could identify ourselves and our skills; post and comment on the work at hand; announce new client projects and get input and participation; and tap into one another’s skills and talents would be invaluable.

How would you use an internal, work-related social networking application like Socialtext?

image of core & periphery from Ross Mayfield’s Flickr page

When you do disagree, you really haven’t had any option to date but to suck it up and trudge along, pretending that you don’t care that Google’s search prioritization disagrees with your own. Now you can finally do something about your contrasting opinion thanks to Google SearchWiki.

More customizability means more productivity for web workers in the long run.

Implemented Thursday, November 20th, Google SearchWiki integrates with existing Google search results, so there are no plugins to install or additional web addresses to visit.

Just enter any search term in any Google search field and the results page that comes up will feature the new SearchWiki functionality.

As you can see in the screenshot above (and as you’ve probably noticed yourself if you’ve conducted a Google search over the weekend), SearchWiki introduces little square arrow and x icons to the right of the individual result titles. I should note that the little target icons are not part of SearchWiki, but rather appear because I have Surf Canyon installed, a very handy results mining Firefox extension.

Clicking on the up arrow “Promotes” an item, moving it up one spot in your results page. Google will remember your decision to promote items, so that if you search for the same term again, your custom search hierarchy will be preserved. Once you’ve promoted an item, a down arrow will also appear, allowing you to return the result to its original position. Clicking the x icon will remove the item from your results. Removed results can be viewed at the bottom of the page, in a list that can be collapsed and expanded, and from which individual items can be restored. You can also comment on any result listed.

You must be signed in to a Google account in order to use SearchWiki features, and your customized results will only work as long as that account is signed in. Comments, however, are a more community-based feature. For any result, you can click a “See all notes” link to see what others have said.

While tailoring your search results will definitely save you some time when Google mining and repeating common searches, the real potential for web working here lies in the new notation feature. Essentially, Google is giving users the opportunity to develop an annotated results base. As long as community members actually make use of the system, it could become a means of pre-screening search results with a human touch, resulting in quicker access to more pertinent information and less wasted time on red herrings and false leads.

If this is going to happen, it’s absolutely crucial that people become involved, and contribute to SearchWiki with some of the same zeal many have shown for Wikipedia. Yes, it will take a little more time per search, but eventually, you’ll get back that time and more. If you’ve ever had the urge to let people know how inappropriate/poorly ranked a returned Google result is, now’s your chance.

Get out there and start opining!

Do we really need to forgo the functionality that we are really looking for when choosing a small team solution? Traction Software says “no,” and they are offering up TeamPage5, a free 5 user version of their Enterprise TeamPage workspace system, as proof.

Traction’s TeamPage was one of the first blog and wiki products to reach market with their 1.0 release in 1999. It is a mature system that has garnered good reviews, and their prior release was awarded Best Enterprise Wiki in the InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Awards.

TeamPage uses a familiar Project metaphor, with each space having its own permission structure. It incorporates all of the standard features you would expect from a wiki / blog like linking, journaling, edit history, tagging and categorization, threaded comments and moderation. It’s the advanced features that make it stand out though. The collector lets you bookmark articles within the system for later reference or action while the ability to view the site in draft view lets you prepare multiple pages before content is published.

Traction TeamPage is a complex system with a comprehensive feature set, actually doing far more than I can cover here. Even common features seem to have an extra layer of functionality designed to make the system more powerful.

For example, TeamPage takes a common feature like tagging and then adds a tremendous amount of functionality to it. Instead of just being an organizational tool, tags are also time based so they can be used for building custom workflows. Track newly tagged items like to do assignments and status, bug priority changes – any combination really. In conjunction with the permission system, tags can be used to pull and aggregate content from across spaces while still maintaining and adhering to your access rules.

The advanced features do add an extra layer of complexity though. That isn’t to say that TeamPage5 is hard to use but there is a learning curve, and some serious thought and planning is recommended to set up a system that can fully take advantage of its capabilities. The challenge for Traction is to balance a very powerful feature set with ease of use, and for the most part I think they pull this off.

Even though it is marketed as an Enterprise Wiki, the system isn’t inherently enterprise. It doesn’t require extensive infrastructure and has a low to moderate bar for deployment. It is Java based with modest system requirements. I was up and running with a local installation and slightly modified base journal in about an hour. Obviously additional configuration and customization can add significant time to that based on your needs. The free TeamPage5 version is great for small teams and can be upgraded to a full server license as your needs grow.

If you’re looking for a powerful collaboration system and are willing to put in a bit of thought and effort to define how it will best be used, TeamPage5 might just be a good option for you.

The free Traction TeamPage5 version supports 5 projects / spaces and 5 named users. Support is provided via an online forum and knowledgebase or additional paid support is available. Upgrades to a full TeamPage license vary based on license type and number of named users.

Are your Wiki needs being fully met by your solution? Is TeamPage5 a contender for you?

But these days, you’re not limited to such primitive serial workflows. Thanks to the web, there are a batch of ways that you can edit a document together with another person – or more than one person – to quickly home in on a final draft. There are three main groups of solution to this problem, each with their own features and drawbacks.

1. Use a Collaborative Web Editor – Web services like Google Documents and Zoho Writer have document sharing built right in. On the plus side, this means a very low barrier to entry: anyone can get an account on these services easily. There’s no requirement for users to have a common operating system, either, which is useful if your collaboration needs span multiple platforms. The downside? Although you get a visual indication that another user is editing, you won’t actually see their changes until they save the document. In the worst case, this can mean simply losing your changes in a “last save wins” situation of multiple edits. Google Documents does maintain a revision history, so you can always go back and see who typed what.

2. Use a Wiki – There are any number of places you can quickly spin up a free wiki, including PBWiki, Nuospace, and Wikidot. Advantages: easy to set up, easy to invite more people to, and you generally get the ability to track revisions and see who contributed what to the document. Disadvantages: depending on the backend you choose, you may have problems with controlling access to your document, and the editing experience may be tough for non-technical users. Also, it can be hard to convert a wiki page into something that looks good in print or elsewhere. Plus you’ll still have the problem of battling edits if two people are trying to work on the document at the same time.

3. Use a Collaborative Editor. For the best possible collaborative editing, I’ve found it necessary to turn away from the web and to client-side software. Packages that implement collaborative editing include SubEthaEdit and Coda on OS X, Gobby and ACE for cross-platform use, and the Microsoft Word add-in CoWord (Windows only). These packages aim to enable a completely common editing session, where you can see what multiple people are doing at the same time. Especially if you’re trying to collaborate on a complex document (or source code), this is head and shoulders above the “wait for a save” workflow of web editors and wikis. But on the downside, you end up tied to client-side software and particular platforms, and these packages are complex enough that they don’t always work perfectly.

If you work on documents collaboratively with other people, what’s your solution? What features do you wish you had?