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Archive for November, 2009

30
Nov

Google Wave

I finally received my invitation to participate in the Google Wave Beta. I’ll be experimenting with it’s collaboration tools and posting updates to my website. In the meantime, if you have a Google Wave account, then you can check out some of the Waves I am participating in below.

Thanks to Lucas Caro for creating the Wavr WordPress Plugin so users can now embed Google Waves into posts.

I’ve decided for now to hold off on Google Wave. The program runs incredibly slow on my G5 PowerPC tower. I will have to do further testing on my macbook pro. So far, I’m not impressed with Google Wave. I have found too many redundancies in the UI to appreciate what I think it could truly offer. I may create a case study to examine the current beta version and how I might rework the design.

11
Nov

Open Atrium – Open Source Intranet

I have been searching for a suitable collaboration tool for many months, if not years now. Things by Cultured Code has been my day to day workhorse as a GTD for completing tasks, but online collaboration with team members is fundamental in managing deadlines, projects, documents, files and calendars.

37 Signals‘ Basecamp has set the bar over the years as the most popular and admired collaboration tool available. Along with Highrise, Campfire and Backpack, they have created one of the most appealing suite of online tools available for project management. However, cost and the fact that you can’t self-host the software has been an issue for many in deciding whether or not it is worth it.

Well, today I think I have finally found one of the best options available. It’s still in the early stages, but Open Atrium is an open-source alternative that combines many of the same features as Basecamp and more. It was created by the incredibly gifted and professional team at DevelopmentSeed.org, who evidently have been around a long time developing open-source software for Drupal and promoting projects for a variety of global causes. As always, there is a bit of a learning curve when installing and running open-source alternatives, but in the end I think Open Atrium is worth the effort.