2.0 C&C tools and my experiences

There has been a few interesting articles about products that hope to assist in the process of communicating and collaborating (C&C). Tangler sets out to do this by providing a mechanism for grouping various discussion sources (blogs, instant messaging, mailing lists) into a single 'group' that can be easily searched, scanned and in turn discussed. It sounds like they aim to get around the problem of information dispersion, ie. an interesting blog here, a somewhat handy mailing list here. This could be really useful in certain arenas like open source where often I find myself going to several similar but different discussion venues (mailing lists, forums, blogs) in order to find the answer to a certain question. Unfortunately it would also seem like the potential for making money out of such a system is pretty low, not only because similar systems already exist but also because the 'value-add' is relatively small when put in the context of the web, search engines and the flexibility of RSS.

Foldera is a new take on the way we use email as Michael Arrington from TechCrunch explains. It is accepted that everyone archives email into folders for later reference but Foldera takes this to a new level by evolving the concept of shared project folders. Foldera is web-based and has email, instant messaging and document management functionality built in. The concept seems pretty interesting but the system would appear to be handicapped by the fact everything happens within Foldera. Consequently for it to be any use at all everyone involved in the project must use the same web-based Foldera system. This is nice from a setting up a new company perspective but so far as integrating its use into existing companies and projects it would be very difficult given the amount of process change and retraining required. A product referenced in the comments section of the TechCrunch article that has similar functionality but is designed around tags is Joyent.

At the heart of it both of these are hosted mail/calendar tools that look and feel very similar to Zimbra and Google Mail/Calendar with a document management portion similar to Fluxiom added for good measure. The fact they offer very limited (or non-existent) integration with existing desktop applications makes them a lot less appealing however.

On the topic of Fluxiom it went public a few weeks ago so I signed up for an account to see what it was like. Whilst the interface was quite appealing I found the service to be somewhat pointless as I could not easily integrate it with my desktop (via WebDAV or a Dashboard Widget) which made putting files into the system a bit of a chore. Plus tags had to be predefined in a separate screen rather than just entered dynamically next to the file which was a real pain (and defied half the purpose of tagging). Mike Arrington wrote a fairly scathing review of it on TechCrunch, not because of what it is but rather its relatively high pricing especially in light of Amazon's S3 storage service pricing.

On the email front there was a good article on NewsForge about using Thunderbird as a context management tool. Rather than using a completely new system similar to Foldera the author proposes we use what we have more intelligently. In this instance folders, email templates and filters within Thunderbird are put to good use to create a fairly tidy document management system. Unfortunately from a user interface and setup perspective its fairly awkward but it works with what is already in place in many offices. For a minimal investment in time and zero dollars the outcome is actually quite powerful.

Talking about email, for the last few months I have been using Zimbra as my office email/collaboration server. Whilst its performance as a mail server has been good I have been pretty dissappointed with its web-interface which in the open-source version is the only way to create calendar events. Whilst Zimbra's interface looks nice its fairly clunky to use and is very fat (150kb+ download). When not in the office its proven a pain to use because on a dial-up connection it takes forever to load and creating new calendar events take just a little too long to be worth the effort. Consequently I've started using Google Calendar for which I must say is really fast and simple to use, the very simple Google aesthetic works well for a productivity application like a calendar as all I want to do is enter events and then view them in iCal or in my Dashboard (both of which are possible thanks to ICS and RSS support in Google Calendar). To get around the fat webmail interface of Zimbra I've installed the far lighter yet just as cool RoundCube, a stylish yet fast IMAP webmail interface written in php. The moral of the story, no matter how good something looks it has to be very fast, as quick to use as possible and preferably integrate with existing infrastructure on the desktop easily.