Writeboard er en super enkel, men meget effektiv online multibruger teksteditor, hvis styrke er enkelhed, enkelhed…enkelhed!. Det var Jane Sandberg, direktør for Arkitektforeningen, der gjorde mig opmærksom på denne gratis online tjeneste, som et stærkt værktøj hvis du skal forfatte, optimere eller procesopbygge en tekst, på tværs af flere personer.

En typisk opfattelse er at dokumentudarbejdelse har et rart og sikkert liv i et uendeligt utal af Word dokumenter, som så kastes rundt mellem de implicerede parters mailprogrammer – præciiis som vi har gjort det siden 80´erne! Men, skal det være effektiv, så skal man altså efterhånden op på beatet.

Writeboard er ikke et nyt program. Men har bevaret sin styrke ved at man kan starte en opgave op uden først at skulle registere sig som bruger mm. Det er opgaven der er i fokus, og alle arbejder i det samme dokument!

Workflow
1. Opgaven opstartes, 2. et oplæg komponeres, 3. samarbejdspartnere inviteres pr mail, 4. alle redigeringer eller omskrivninger gemmes i en historikoversigt, 5. De forskellige versioner kan sammenlignes visuelt, 6. løbende kommentering og diskussion opsamles separat med redigeringen.

Et alternativ til Writeboard er den tidligere tjeneste Writely.com, som er blevet opkøbt af Google og nu hedder Google Docs. Her skal du dog have en google account, men får så endnu flere værktøjer til rådighed. Faktisk har du alt for mange værktøjer, og det gør at mange (travle) arkitekter vil fravælge det med det samme!

www.writeboard.com

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation I’d been trying to put together for the best part of six months and this evening I’ve sent it on to the users who attended and who were unable to attend but showed an interest.  I realised at this point I hadn’t actually blogged about it so I thought I might put together a little post about it.

The aim was simply to share some ideas and some bits of ICT that could help people do their jobs quicker/better/cheaper/economically/more easily.  Many of these were based upon queries from users and solutions  found or in some cases pre-emptively finding options for issues that have yet to be raised.

A note was put into the staff briefing and some posters put up around the office to try and get people along to the presentation.  The attendance was surprisingly low and it’s unfortunate in terms of what people missed out on but I thought I’d highlight the areas that were discussed and some high level points on what was demonstrated and discussed.

The presentation was split into four main sections – software, hardware, web sites and engaging with the ICT team.

Software

• Skype
• Working with PDFs
  • Microsoft Office plug ins
  • PDF printers
  • PDF Bulder Toolkit
  • Drawloop.com
• Public Folders in Outlook

Hardware

• Photocopiers
  • Printing
  • Scanning
  • Secure printing & scanning
• Data Capture
  • Dictaphones
  • Digital cameras
  • DigiMemo
  • MIMIO
• Communication
  • Teleconferencing units
  • Audio/telephony cabling

Web Sites

• Collaboration
  • Microsoft SharePoint
  • Google Docs
  • Etherpad
  • Writeboard
  • Dabbleboard
  • Mind Meister
  • Vyew
• Online Presentations
  • Instant Presenter
  • Microsoft Communications Server
  • Dim Dim
• Meeting Scheduling
  • Doodle
  • Meet-o-matic
• To Do Lists
  • To Do Ist
• File Sharing
  • Orbit Files

Engaging with ICT

• Service Desk
  • Queries
  • Training
• Invitation
  • Project meetings
  • Team meetings
• Communications
  • Presentations
  • Briefings
  • Mailings
  • Bulletins
  • Newsletters

I don’t plan on publishing the presentation widely as much of it is only directly relevant to Academy ICT users in the way it is presented, but the outline above gives an indication of the content and areas in which the user community is developing.

Hopefully some imminent developments might help create a greater sharing of such ideas and information within a community and build a better culture of knowledge sharing and management.

Что такое Getting Real?

Хотите создать успешное веб-приложение? Тогда пришло время для подхода "Getting Real", легковесного, быстрого и в целом лучшего пути создания программного обеспечения.

• Getting Real — это отказ от вещей, представляющих реальность (диаграммы, графики, схемы, стрелочки и модели) и создание реальной вещи
• Getting Real — это значит "меньше". Меньше массы, меньше программного обеспечения и его возможностей, меньше бумагомарания — словом, меньше всего того, что является несущественным (а большая часть того, что, как вам кажется, критически важно, на самом деле таковым не является)
• Getting Real значит оставаться небольшим и шустрым.
• Getting Real начинает с интерфейса, с реальных экранов, которыми будут пользоваться ваши клиенты. Это позволяет получить правильный интерфейс до того, как вы создадите неправильную программу.
• Getting Real — это итерации и снижение стоимости изменений,
• Getting Real — это запуск и постоянное улучшение. То есть подход, идеальный для веб-приложений.
• Getting Real — это создание того, в чём нуждается клиент и исключение того, что ему не нужно.

Продолжение можно прочесть здесь

This will be a simple tandem text editor. It will broad cast document events to clients over a web connection. What it should do is allow more than one person to edit a document at the same time. Of course the one editing has a lock.

more

I love it when a volunteer projects gives something back to me. Today I learned about a clever online tool called Writeboard. It’s a free, password protected, wiki-type application that captures text by one or more authors and keeps a revision and comment trail. We’re using it to create an expanded outline of key points for an online eLearning course that I volunteered to help build. The points they captured collaboratively will become the seed copy for the course storyboards.

The coolest part of this project is that all of the collaborators I am working with are what we in the learning industry would consider SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and most have little background in formal learning design. I gave them some basic guidelines for writing learning objectives and they authored a concise and workable list of five. Then they met again and came back to me with a link to a Writeboard site where they have expanded the list into a course outline. All of this in less than a week; I wish that all my SMEs were this motivated and creative!

 Check out this little screen tour of Writeboard and think about ways you might use it to collaborate with your own project teams. Here are a list of other creative uses for Writeboard.

How might you collaborate with Writeboard?

The beauty of 37signals products, including Writeboard, is keeping things simple.  But if you’re going to do just the simple stuff – you need to do it right.

It’s pretty clear where the “formatting guide” should open:

but no.  Instead my editing area is pushed off the screen and my sidebar real-estate continues to be underused.

Ok, well that’s unfortunate (and admittedly quite minor).  At least now I can figure out what syntax to use to insert a pre-formatted block…  or maybe not.  The formatting guide not only doesn’t include what I want – it doesn’t mention that there are other options even available.

It’s pretty simple to find the true formatting guide for Writeboards though.  All you have to do is traverse the internets for 20 minutes.

1. Try the formatting guide.

2. Start a blog post complaining about it appearing in a nonsensical location.

3. Search Wikipedia for “Writeboard” and find the note about Textile.

4. Go to the Textile Wikipedia page

5. Use their link to the full syntax reference.

See!  It’s nice and simple!  Hooray!

In the world of branding, Web 2.0 companies are clamoring for name originality. Bookgoo is out there in terms of weird names but in terms of applications for collaboration, their technology rocks. The company set out to “empower users to collaborate more effectively.” And you, dear Web worker, get the benefits of their hard work.

Through Bookgoo, you can upload a document (pdf, html, doc, xls, jpg, gif) or URL and opt to make it either private or public. At first, I was envisioning another Scribd. Then I thought it sounded a bit like Backboard, a feedback site I recently reviewed here. But that is where the functionality diverges from both of those sites into a nifty annotating tool for marking up documents in a way that makes Google Docs look a little plain vanilla and some of the online whiteboard apps available seem a bit old school.

Bookgoo actually makes marking up a document fun. Upload your document, invite others to view it and provide their input, and then watch the annotating begin.

On Bookgoo, you get your dashboard view of your document activity on you “Goo Gate” where you can: 1) Add notes to the document by highlighting particular text and typing in related notes; 2) Draw on the document; or 3) Change the pen color when you draw.

The annotations you make lay over the document, but do not change it. Even when you highlight text by clicking and holding your cursor then dragging it over text, the text is not actually modified but the highlighted words contain the related comments.

Because Bookgoo doesn’t change the document, the tool works well for commenting on and pointing to changes that should be made. Then someone can download the original document from the site – without the annotations – and implement the modifications from viewing the modifications online.

Other things you can do with your Bookgoo include:

1. Subscribing to a document RSS feed. Get notified each time someone modifies your document.

2. Emailing documents to a friend. You can allow others to access the modified document directly from the document page. This feature, however, brought up the question of privacy for me. Currently, Bookgoo does not offer different levels of privacy features and even their “private” mode is not very private and definitely not secure. Of course, if you have very sensitive documents, uploading them to the Internet at all is a risk.

3. Adding a document to your MyGoo page. If you upload a document, it is automatically archived on and accessible from your MyGoo page. However, if you are invited to annotate someone else’s document, you can also add that to MyGoo for easy access.

4. Sharing a document with a group. You can create groups and must do this first before adding a document to the group.

5. Adding the document to your social networks and other sites. The presence of an AddThis button brought me back to my questions about privacy. At this time, even if you opt to make your document private, once you share that URL with others, they have the ability to share your document broadly. The company calls their privacy option “pseudo privacy” for this very reason. Therefore you need to trust those to whom you give access or keep really private documents in much more secure environments.

Some of the downsides or limitations of Bookgoo:

1. Lack of more robust privacy features. Bookgoo plans to release role-based permissions soon.

2. Inability to use word documents newer than Microsoft Word 2003. Support for newer docs is pending.

3. Difficulty sifting through larger documents for annotations. Another upcoming feature will be “page inspection” for large, multi-page documents so you can inspect 10 pages at a time to locate annotations deep within a document.

4. Still somewhat buggy. While doing the first demo with the company, I uncovered several bugs that rendered some of the key features inoperable. The Bookgoo tech team rectified those problems so that everything seemed to work well during the second demo. But you may end up finding a few more bugs here and there.

The folks at Bookgoo don’t anticipate ever charging for any level of their application and see their business model as more a software licensing venture as well as experimenting with Ad Sense. They simply want to offer Bookgoo free to the general online community.

Gotta love their spirit!

How do you annotate documents collaboratively online?

Thanks to Amy Grasmick and the VLA Personnel Committee, I’ve actually worked on a doc collaboratively, via Writeboard. Looking at changes other committee members had made was often a timesaver (we didn’t have to correct that glaring typo, someone else had done it) and offered a good substitute for getting together to laboriously work out changes.

I wonder if we’re coming to a time when there will be enough apps on the web to obviate the need for real software on the computer. While the work environment supplies word processing, database management, and presentation tools, I’m not that eager to go out and work with them on the web. And the exception would be: those collaborative projects.

Come to think of it, there is one other case. I choose not to travel with a computer. I could see using the web as a place to cache or create materials while I’m traveling.

I kept coming across “social graphs” and didn’t really understand it, until I read this good post by Dion Hinchcliffe.

[Update (15 Feb 08, 01:16pm HK time): Cool PostIt-like way to track changes added to Backpack.)

[Update (13 Feb 08, 10:45am HK time) : "Messages" and "Newsroom" features added to Backpack.]

37signals just announced that their online “information manager” Backpack is now multi-user:

Backpack matures into a great business tool
There’s a clear advantage to a multiuser Backpack account: Backpack becomes a wonderful small business/group tool.

While Basecamp is great for managing client and internal projects, Backpack multiuser becomes a great tool for sharing information across your organization, centralizing knowledge, and a home base for all those little bits that everyone needs but no one can find. Since anyone with access to a page can add content, Backpack pages turn into collaborative blank slates.

So many of the things people use enterprise wikis (and formerly tried to use intranets for)–authoring content of multiple types for commenting and collaboration, tagging, notification/alerts, basic project managment and caledaring–for can now be done easily and elegantly in Backpack. Check it out. One main defining feature of wikis that Backpack can’t do: track multiple revisions in collaborative documents, including the ability to “roll back” to an earlier version. But 37signals’ Writeboard does exactly this. And Writeboards can be attached to Backpack pages.

So, voilà, new multi-user Backpack + Writeboard = good, easy to use SME wiki (with SSL). And it’s relatively inexpensive: US$5-US$14/user per month, depending on the plan.

We can ship our holiday presents early because we accumulate presents in the course of the year. The problem then becomes keeping track of what we’ve bought for whom. So this year I’ve set up a Gift List document in Writeboard to which The Wife and I both have access. The first section is “Birthdays”, with all family members listed, and the second section is “Christmas,” again with everyone listed. A few presents are already in place for next year, and we will gradually accumulate the rest and (I hope) update the Writeboard document as we go. The main benefit is that either of us can review the document at any time to determine where we need presents. (It’s free, of course)

“Me esfuerzo cada día en ser más simple, para así conseguir ser complejo de forma más natural” (Richard Peris)

Una cosa es la simplicidad encontrada y otra muy distinta la simplicidad buscada, que al final siempre suele ser simplicidad esforzada; una cosa es que una actividad resulte inadvertidamente simple y otra diferente que se note, que se perciba fuertemente el esfuerzo acometido para intentar que la misma actividad resulte simple.

Pagii ofrece páginas Web personales en minutos: y es cierto que la creación es fácil (sobre todo porque no se sabe lo que se está creando y las preguntas son sencillas), pero el resultado es… ¿esforzado? Es algo parecido a comprar una mascota en el mercado negro de trata de animales –lo que puede resultar turbadoramente fácil– y luego descubrir que se trata de un niño (las dificultades se amontonan con rapidez descorazonadora). Mi prueba en Pagii acabó cuando fui consciente de haber terminado el proceso y no saber bien qué hacer con el resultado, ni cómo seguir; y realmente me sentí como un niño intentando comprender el Logo con instrucciones de tortuga (arriba, atrás, 50, 100) sin asimilar muy bien la esencia del asunto y por qué, simplemente, no se cogía la tortuga para manejarla. Y algo parecido me ha ocurrido con WriteBoard (de los chicos de 37signals): pese a que se apoya en BackPack y a su parecido asombroso con Jottit, he de reconocer que la simplicidad brutal (y casi culpable) de este último me ha cautivado, así que en mi prueba con Jottit incluso he dejado algo escrito. En Jottit se nota la simplicidad, pues las cosas sólo pueden funcionar en un único sentido (y a veces hasta piensas que se te han perdido algunos botones); en WriteBoard se nota el esfuerzo. Y, con todo, la diferencia entre ambos es mínima; pero suficiente para ser percibida de forma simple.

Claro que, por otro lado, simple no es canónico; y, por ejemplo, un ordenador o un televisor puede ser más simple que otro ofreciendo, sin embargo, más opciones. Así, WordPress y Blogger son endiabladamente simples, y su ejemplo comercial se ha extendido.

El esfuerzo no es importante, pese a lo importante que haya podido ser. Puede ser meritorio que un mocoso de 3 años interprete a Chopin; pero su interpretación será lamentable, con todo. En su libro “The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) ”, John Maeda expone interesantes aspectos y facetas de la simplicidad, y se despacha con varias simplezas agradables, como la mención de los libros de referencia sólo por su título, sin la parafernalia de ISBN y demás, que podrá ser encontrada en la Web. Pero Maeda, al final, cae en la simplificación esforzada, pues el texto de su libro tiene exactamente (y de forma buscada y argumentada) 100 páginas: ¿Mérito de lo simple o maquetación meritoria?

Voici une liste d’outils web dans différents domaines
Sites de Tag :

• Shadows
• Technorati

Sites de BookMark :

• BlogMarks
• Pluck
• Furl
• Essential-bookmarks
• Del icio us

Sites de Syndications :

• Bloglines
• Newsgator
• Feedster
• Rojo
• Bloxor
• Feedburner

Sites de Carnet d’adresse :

• Ringo
• Plaxo

Sites Partage Photos :

• Zoto
• Flickr
• Riya
• Buzznet

Sites Réseaux Sociaux :

• Linkedin
• 6nergies
• Viaduc
• dotNode

Sites pour publicités :

• Google ADsense RSS
• MSN AdCenter
• Yahoo Publisher

Moteurs de Recherches:

• http://www.ysearchblog.com/
• Inquisitor Search
• Y!QLayLinks

Tracking et Moteur pour blog

• BlogPulse
• Yahoo Search Blog

Organisation

• BackPack
• bugmenot
• JotLive
• WriteBoard

Sites de Veille :

• Net2One
• Atiki