Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
collaborative software, note strong, for small biz
Steven Avery:
Hi
I poke in an out of Zoho at times. I know the actual document writing is fine, although not necessarily snappy. I have to see if the structure can be made pleasant. Similar situations with Ubernote and PBWorks, which have different paradigms, without the note at center.
What I am doing now is watching the collaboration videos, also looking for references to Rich Text Editor or RTF in the reviews, by google searching, stuff like that. There are a lot of lean and clean collaboration project and task management softwares, however they seem to consider actual editing (even e.g. similar to a web forum, I am not talking about all the word processing things) to be a non-issue. I think they might be lazy and not want to check which RTF implementation they can integrate. After all, they would, I think, only have to do API coding, or whatever it is when you embed an RTF editor. That is why the lack is surprising.
I'm also looking at this review article from 2012, which has a cloud section, although it is not collaboration oriented.
The Best Apps and Cloud Services for Taking, Storing, and Sharing Notes
http://www.howtogeek.com/114794/the-best-apps-and-cloud-services-for-taking-storing-and-sharing-notes/
Springpad and Springnote are defunct.
Listhings looks like an alternative to compare to Google Keep for an online sticky page.
WebAsyst I had looked at, may flunk the rtf doc test, will check.
Penzu looks cute, the RTF editing function looks similar to ProofHub, ie. limited yet acceptable, however it is not collaboration software.
Evernote .. dunno, I never took to it in the past, worthy of some consideration.
Not included:
Wiznotes is a sleeper, discovered here. Maybe the best, putting aside the China Syndrome.
Onenote, again dunno, how is the cloud implemenation.
Ubernote - maybe the main one not included that is right in the genre.
Steven
40hz:
Wiznotes is a sleeper, discovered here. Maybe the best, putting aside the China Syndrome.-Steven Avery (September 01, 2014, 03:56 PM)
--- End quote ---
Not exactly an inconsequential consideration these days. Having something written and hosted in Communist China is almost as dangerous as parking it in the USA.
Onenote, again dunno, how is the cloud implemenation.
--- End quote ---
I personally think OneNote is vastly overrated. But it's a paradigm thing with me. How a big sloppy freeform notebook helps people keep organized is beyond me. For creative use, brainstorming, a junk box for rough notes and snippets...possibly. But for keeping a complex project on track? Not my idea of how to do it.
That said, the web implementation actually isn't bad. OneNote is one of those things (like Outlook) that seems to make a lot more sense with a big web-enabled server standing behind it. I use OneNote (reluctantly) because some of my clients use it. They're real diehards who put the time in to master all it's little nuances and quirks. (Of which there are far too many AFAIC.) But these same people are pulling down solid 6 and 7-digit salaries most of 'em (they run a private hedge fund) ...so what do I know? :mrgreen:
Microsoft will give you a free 30 day on Office365 complete with all the fixin's. Best bet is to check it out and pound on it. For a certain class of business requirements, O365 is pretty hard to beat. If you don't fit the model of the user Microsoft went into it with, it's another story. (You really can't customize it easily. And some parts you just can't. Period) But if you're one of the business cases Microsoft designed Office 365 for, rest assured it will serve you very well indeed. If you do subscribe, pay the extra to get the plan that lets you install the actual Office software on your PC. That way you have on and offline capabilities. And it really doesn't cost that much more. It's $12.50 a month with a 12-month subscription. You can pay up front or month-to-month . But month-to-month cost $15/user if you do.
Steven Avery:
Hi,
One excellent thing that came out of this search.
It looks like Listhings
http://listhings.com/
(they need to show you a better picture - my board already would be far better than what I find on the net, however it has phone #s etc.)
can be my main note program, working with a sticky paradigm, yet with more sophistication. Colorful notes, multiple pages (i.e tabs) and bold, italics, etc. ie. No real RTF (so it is limited, not for my style of writing and research) but the colorful notes and background, combined with bold usage for titles is good enough for quick note - reminder - capability. Has overlap capability. Has some features like checkbox capability and auto-arrange that I have not used.
They mention collaboration, that may be a function of simply using the tabs==pages harmoniously. Each person has a "to" page or topics get a page, stuff like that. However, they do have a "share" button, so I will see their thinking. Maybe I can set up a view page and then invite people to see, with a url, who do not have edit capability.
Apparently, the pro model makes them some revenue (there is a page discussing the sale of the site and company for the modest $20K in 2012, it began in 2009) from people who put pictures up there at $2.50 a month. That seems fair enough if you are using listhings as your all purpose sort of showcase or collaborative notes.
I just tried an upload and it goes like this:
"You can upload files of up to 3 MB each. Become a Listhings Pro user and upload files of up to 12 MB each, and get 5 GB disk space for images. That's enough for 5 million medium-size photos. $2.50/month"
So maybe I can upload my smallish .jpg screenshots even in the free version. Yep, it works! And, since my pics tend to have print, I can stretch them by normal mouse stuff to make them readable at the size I want.
In structure, it works a lot like Xerpi, which is my top-down url program (linkman is my down-up program) with many pages, in terms of the tab==page structure.
Really fine app.
Apparently Google Keep and some extensions like Dashnote for Chrome are the other players in the field. Do we have a thread on net sticky pages? Also there are sticky programs like Internote that work on web pages that I have tried to like, that is a totally different field anyway.
To me Listhings seems to be a start to bridging the gap from stickies to regular (Rightnote) stuff for the small pages filled with notes. Rightnote, or the cloud attempt equivalent, then becomes the large text (articles, research) use only.
Steven
Steven Avery:
Hi,
At this point I am revisiting Zoho and HyperOffice. Since both have a real document motif, along with folders, storage, and additional functions like tasks and chat and discussions (a la carte tricky in Zoho) and seem less confusing that the Microsoft and Google environments, they may be the best for this type of light-to-moderate collaboration. At least you know you can make a nice RTF document and place it in its natural spot and then find it later.
Steven
allen:
Not the silver bullet you're looking for, but what has worked for me the last year or so is Draft for collaborative document editing and Asana for... well, everything else.
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