Good Collaboration Tools

Good online collaboration tools MUST have GOOD search integrated, otherwise, the tool is doomed to become a derivative form of a message board or forum. While forums are useful and have their place, there is nothing revolutionary about a collaboration tool's ability to act as a message board.

While many online collaboration tools contain some degree of search, few if any, encompass full text and complete document search. Many of the lightweight and free hosted collaboration tools and wiki's available today have not integrated "enterprise" search into their platform. Most of these applications simply do not have the infrastructure or portability to manage indexing, permissions/user rights and caching at the levels that typical business users require.

The democratic nature of new collaboration tools based on wikis (such as Central Desktop) are great mechanisms for inputting data into a "black box"....but it is Search Technology that make these collaboration tools (wikis) less of a black box and more of a revolutionary application. The very nature of wikis and collaboration tools are chaotic......and what Search Technology has taught us over the years is that Search is the tool that makes sense of chaos. Almagamating Collaboration Tools and Search Technology is what will propel collaboration tools and wikis into the enterprise and beyond.

As wikis and collaboration tools continue to evolve beyond a text-driven medium into a central repository and platform for documents, files, images and other data, the need for full text and document (file) level search is absolutely necessary.

Luckily, Central Desktop meets this basic requirement of a Good Collaboration Tool.

Search Engine Improvements and Firefox Plugin

Tonight, we are releasing a 'vamped up' version of our Search Engine in Central Desktop. We tweaked Search a bit here and there to improve the overall user experience. You are now able to Filter your results by Activity Type. Depending on what you are searching for, Central Desktop users will be able to find information faster by filtering their search results by either Files, Web Pages, Discussions, Pages/Notes, Tasks or Events.

Lastly, for our heavy Firefox Central Desktop Users, we are happy to announce a Firefox Firefox Central Desktop Search Plugin. This plugin will enable Firefox users to Search their Central Desktop Workspaces directly through their browser, using the built-in Firefox Search Function (usually located in the upper right hand corner of their browser).

RSS Feed Improvements

Welcome back and Happy New Year to everyone!

Over the holidays we carved out some time to make your Central Desktop RSS Feeds more useful. In addition to the RSS Feed Personalization that we released before the Holidays, we've retooled the feeds to display the Workspace Activity content with uniformed headers that present the content in a manner that is much easier on the eyes.

Up until now, the Central Desktop Feeds were bland and perfunctory often displaying unclear or confusing information about Workspace Activities. For our larger customers with several users in a Workspace this made their RSS experience akin to drinking water from a firehose (to use an overused expression).

Additionally, in this release we are including some BETA code that many of you will find useful. If you are reading Workspace RSS Feeds in Outlook via an RSS Reader Plugin (such as Attensa or Newsgator) you will notice that you can REPLY to Central Desktop and UPDATE your Workspace by simply using the HTML forms and checkboxes in the RSS Feed.

You can complete Tasks, Comment on Tasks and Reply to Discussion Threads all through your RSS Feed in Outlook. All this without cluttering up your email Inbox.

We plan on doing a lot more with these RSS Feeds and making them more interactive. So let us know your thoughts on this and if you have comments or suggestions.

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