Tag: COLLABORATION

It's hot off the press, and still being slowly unrolled, but the Google Docs blog has just announced some major changes to its office productivity suite of web tools. You can stop reading now and watch the video if you want to find out what's new, or read on for some bullet points! Faster -- what with Google Docs being entirely in the browser, things can sometimes get a bit slow with ...

Showing off the truly omnivorous and omnipotent nature of Wave, there is now an internal Extension Gallery. All you have to do is hit the 'Extensions' button on Wave's Navigation menu and voila! Until now, it's always been a bit tricky to find 'proper' extensions for Wave. There have been a few lists, but gadgets are often plagued with stability issues (or they don't work at all), and robots ...

Google has been steadily adding to the variety of file types allowed in Google Apps -- you can store or share basically anything, now -- but there was still a missing link between the Microsoft Office documents you use on your desktop and the Google Docs files you edit in the cloud. A third party service called DocVerse bridged that gap, and now Google has acquired DocVerse. We first reported ...

Crocodoc is a free service that lets you mark up and annotate documents collaboratively. You upload a file (DOC, PDF, PPT...) and Crocodoc converts it into a PDF-looking document that you (and anyone else who knows the URL) can mark up. Note that it's mark up only. You cannot edit the text. Even worse (for me), you cannot export the text in any way. Maybe that's why they call it Crocdoc -- ...

If you're looking to implement a secure, private chat environment in your company, have a look at what's going on at Ignite Realtime with their OpenFire real time collaboration server and Spark cross-platform IM client. Being that they are open source, both OpenFire and Spark are free; that makes it easy to convince management to give it a try. But the open source nature of the products also ...

Picasa, Google's photo sharing service, has allowed collaborative photo albums on the web for months, but the Picasa desktop app is just now getting this feature. Now, when you upload an album using the desktop, you can assign editing privileges to other users. That way, you can easily collect everyone's photos of an event in the same shared album. With collaborative albums, you can either give ...

In a move aimed at improving the collaborative, real-time functionality of Wave, Google has acquired AppJet Inc. AppJet and its EtherPad software provides the only 'really real-time' word processor on the Internet. While there are other collaborative multi-user tools like Google Docs, they only send occasional updates -- EtherPad updates every half a second. Just like Google Wave! I doubt this ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/11/18/outlook-2010-social-connector-activity-streams/'; It's been a long time coming, and perhaps a little too late, but you can now track your friends' and colleagues' social networking activity in Outlook 2010. Dubbed the 'Outlook Social Connector' (OSC), the functionality is available right now to all Office 2010 Beta testers. The list of ...

AbiWord is a light weight, open source word processor for Windows and Linux that can create and edit documents in a variety of formats including DOC, RTF, TXT, HTML, and ABW. The word processor is often overlooked in favor of the fuller featured OpenOffice.org. But if you don't need a full office suite that takes up hundreds of megaybtes, AbiWord is worth checking out -- and the latest version ...

I noticed this function a while ago when I upgraded to Photoshop CS4 -- I never dared use it, but I did notice it! Now there's a handy little video from Adobe that shows you exactly how to enable the free screen sharing available to you in their latest suite of tools. You're probably thinking: Neat! But what can I actually do with it? The first thing that comes to my mind is for businesses that ...

Although Zoho offers a suite of apps that competes with Google Apps, there's no reason for them to let the huge Google Apps userbase slip through their fingers when it comes to project management. Zoho Projects, the planning and collaboration web app from Zoho, now integrates with Google Apps. You can now sign into Zoho Projects with your Google Apps login, and plug your Google Docs right into ...

Remember the other day when I said I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the security providers join forces for the greater good? Sophos' Graham Cluely has this morning announced the formation of the Industry Connections Security Group under the umbrella of the IEEE Standards Association's Industry Connections program. Initially the group includes Sophos, Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, AVG, and ...

Sometimes, the best people for a job can't all assemble in the same physical location. That's not a problem when everyone's working independently, but even the best remote coworkers sometimes need to have a meeting. Team Apart makes that possible, with really simple real-time collaboration features including audio/video chat and whiteboarding. It's easy to invite people to your Team Apart ...

Because I work almost exclusively in remote-based teams, I'm always looking for new tools and services that can help me manage my daily tasks and effectively collaborate with my team members. One of the biggest problems I have with some collaboration systems is that they require everyone to login and collaborate using the web app itself. This is great if you are always in one place or in a ...

Open Atrium is a new open-source "team portal" that looks like it's going to be running a lot of intranets in the near future. It comes with six basic features: a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard. You can also create smaller groups within your team, and they'll each have members-only versions of those features. That's pretty useful, but where Atrium separates ...