Moved to Syncnode

Hi all. I’ve just finished setting up syncnode.com and moved the Staction review over. It will be a continuation of what I have written here.  Please join me there!

Moving to www.syncnode.com

Soon I will be moving my blog to a paid host. I’ve registered www.syncnode.com and will be setting that up. In the meantime, you can visit my personal blog at www.hng.name. Once everything is finalised I will make a final post here.

Staction: Communications and Project Mangement Done Right

I’ve been testing a web collaboration app called Staction from Paste Interactive and its funky enough that I’ve decided to review. Their website claims that the tool isn’t a me-too Basecamp app and they weren’t kidding.

Main screen after login

The tool is extremely simple and elegant but because of its innovative design, is very functional too. Think of this as Yammer on steroids. So it is a micro-blogging tool at its core. However it has two input boxes instead of one.

Main textbox on top and the metabox just below

The top is your traditional text box. What really sets this tool apart is the ‘metabox’ below it where you basically tag your message. That might not sound very novel but there’s more to it than that. There are three types of tags, preset system tags, project tags and people tags.

The system tags are inbuilt and help you do things like assign a todo, track time or upload files. Todo’s are automatically appended to the bottom of your dashboard and time is recorded.

Dashboard

Attached file linked in stream

Project tags collate all the updates that relate to them and have their own set of permissions that can be set by the administrator. People tags can only be view by people they are assigned to. There are a few other cool functions such as custom views and assigning others todos that I haven’t had a chance to play with.

The only downside is that while you can get RSS feeds, there are no email updates. I’ve messaged the guys behind the project and they have told me that this is something they are thinking about building in. I think they are somewhat against it in principle as “Email is not a great solution for internal group communication. Keep your inbox for your clients.” I agree however I think unless you have lots of buy-in with your team or can mandate it, getting everyone off email is a big step.

In the works is their API and a desktop app. Let’s hope this catches on and we get a little ecosystem around it. Worth a try if you are want a simple but powerful.

Staction Pricing

Edit: Found a review with the creaters at ehub. Might be a worth a ready to find out a little more about the app and the people behind it.

Confluence Update

I didn’t end up writing up that review for Confluence for two main reasons. One, I just didn’t have time after exams started at uni. Two, Confluence v3 was released and I was using v2 so it didn’t much sense to do a full review of a older version.

I will write a few comments about it however. I’ve used both PBwiki (now PBworks) and Confluence for online collaboration so I have something to compare against. Confluence is a much more powerful beast with many more built-in ‘macros’ that add a heap of functionality. Being more complex however means that it requires a higher start-up cost and you will definitely need someone who is willing to spend time to structure everything initially and maintain it. If you have these resources however, it is a great tool to create an internal portal or for knowledge management.

This is definitely something I will keep my eyes on.

Introduction

This is my first post so by way of introduction, I’ll quote my About page to let you guys know what this blog is.

This is a review site for the different collaboration programs I have reviewed or actually in a small group basis. Generally, most of the tools I review will have a SMB application.

I started this blog because I’m very interesting in how technology can be used to connect people especially in a professional environment. While email is a fantastic tool to send messages, it is terrible in a group collaboration environment where you need to keep everyone in the loop and have a central repository for calendaring, contacts, file storage etc. I started looking at other solutions to help groups collaborate online and have found all the different tools out fascinating. I will be sharing my experiences and hopefully you will find this useful when selecting a collaboration solution.

The tool I will be reviewing is an enterprise wiki called Confluence. I am currently using it in a group of 4 to collaborate on an investment banking competition called the UBS Challenge. I will complete a review after we finish the competition.