I saw the discussion of web 2.0 collaboration options and thought I’d let you know about Coventi Pages, an online office product that’s different from the rest.

It gives users powerful tools for reviewing documents and creating comments directly tied to the text. These comments are the beginning of a conversation thread that anyone on the document can participate in. Authors have the ability to respond to the group’s feedback and push out new revisions.

It’s much less clumsy than Google Docs and wikis, and really gets everyone on the same page.

Check out our video and see how easy it to use:

www.coventi.com/videos/IntroToPages.aspx

See here:
http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/12/tubes_a_new_way.html

Good questions. In order:
1. By default, the person who starts the Activity Folder is in charge of permissions to the folder and to their items in the folder. They can give other people the ability to invite others (or not), and anyone who is invited to the folder has the right to set permissions on their own stuff (the tasks, events and documents they create).

2. Person B could add a document or a task to the Activity Folder. If they set the permissions as “private”, only they would see it. If they set the permissions as “public”, everyone who could access the folder could set it. “Custom” permissions gives the ability to set user-by-user or group-by-group rights to the item.

3. The email sits in the shared Activity Folder for Person B, but only they can see it. At this time, email messages in Foldera are not shared objects. It also shows in Person B’s summary view … that is, all emails to Person B regardless of the Activity Folder it relates to.

Hope this makes sense.
M.

Michael Sampson
Global VP of Research
Foldera, Inc.

You said:

“If you and I were both Foldera users, I would start an Activity Folder for a joint project. I would then invite you (add you to the list of authorized users for that folder, along with an access level). My folder would then show in your Foldera interface. You could see everything therein that I’d let you see. It’s the same folder, shared across 2 users. There isn’t a public version and a private one.”

OK, so who ever starts the Activity folder (Person A) is by default in charge of permissions, and is letting you (Person B) have a peak (basically sharing) at their emails, IM, tasks, documents within that folder. You can even have access to collaborate on a document.

Does this mean you can even add a document, or task?

But what if Person B gets an email related to that activity from another shared person like Person C, where does that email sit in Person B’s email client. Does it go in Person B’s inbox, and then they can decide to add it to the Activity folder (that is being shared by Person A).

Surely an email directed to Person B can’t be routed straight to the activity folder, because then Person A or any other shared person could read Person B’s email, even before they do.

There’s something I’m missing here.

With respect to document collaboration, Foldera Activity Folders can be used in a similar way to the wiki scenario you outlined. The lead author would upload a Word document / PowerPoint presentation, and then (a) either email others to let them know it was there, or (b) expect that they’d see it via on-screen notification of a new document. Others can open the document, make revisions, upload the most recent as a new version, and/or leave comments on the document. As of the current beta release, we don’t have in place browser based editing, but that is something we are thinking about

With respect to “bringing collaboration into email”, our approach is to add collaborative capabilities into what people know as an “email client” today. For example, in our Foldera Activity Folders hosted service, we’ve added (a) an activity construct so that each user’s email, tasks, calendar entries and documents are automagically organized by activity, and (b) sharing of activities and items therein.

Your analysis of how an activity folder is shared is close … however we don’t have the distinction between “public” and “private” activity folders as you’ve described. Let me clarify. If you and I were both Foldera users, I would start an Activity Folder for a joint project. I would then invite you (add you to the list of authorized users for that folder, along with an access level). My folder would then show in your Foldera interface. You could see everything therein that I’d let you see. It’s the same folder, shared across 2 users. There isn’t a public version and a private one.

You ask about emails that are not replies. Today they will show in the general Inbox, rather than being automagically routed into an activity folder. The person receiving the email can then indicate what activity folder it is to be moved into. For our initial release, I can live with that. For future releases … well, anything could happen

Thanks for the ideas for other features. Mobile access is definitely a key and current focus.

Finally, we’re still in beta testing for Foldera Activity Folders, with a wider beta round coming up. We’re working toward a first open public release in 1Q2007. At that time, I’ll be delighted to hear your feedback.

Kind regards,
M.

Michael Sampson
Global VP of Research
Foldera, Inc.

I posted a reply as a new post:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/12/19/km-20-momentum/

Regarding point 2…several forum posts within a forum, I think, is much more neat than lots of emails when tracing the path of conversation. But following a blog conversation is not the easiest thing to do:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/10/14/distributed-conversations-pinging-and-tagging

A couple of reactions:
1. You say “If we could deal with the cultural adoption issue with enterprise 2.0, basically “people problem”, we will see that things can be much more fluid, induce sharing and innnovation, and create communal knowledge banks (corporate memory).” One of the things that early groupware and collaboration technology vendors said was that the mere implementation of such technology would result in greater collaborative behaviors. That was found to be untrue. I’d be careful about using the term “induce”, as for me it signifies a forcing of someone to act in a certain way. My view is that there are cultural adoption issues that need to be addressed, and there are also significant technology issues that also need to be addressed, such as the “scattering” that you refer to.

2. You say “Anyway, I was thinking of a work scenario where I had to collaborate on a document, and how email was going to be cumbersome, and in the end would not leave a neat presented trail where others can visit the process of the collaboration that took place.” … For me, it depends on what you mean by “neat”. If you mean “ease of retracing the conversation”, then perhaps that is equally difficult regardless of what tool you use. At least, it is currently for someone new coming in. If you mean, “ease of seeing everything related to the collaboration in a single place”, then I’d generally agree that email isn’t the best. The exception I was thinking of is where email is paired with AfterMail (now owned by Quest) to automatically create a shared space of the email discussion over time.

3. Your focus on document collaboration is something that interests me too. I have an article on that in the Messaging News magazine. See http://www.michaelsampson.net/2006/06/mayjune_edition.html if you want to read it. It’s a PDF that you’ll have to download.

4. Another issue that we are jointly concerned about it scattered information. That was one of the themes of my article on the need for interoperable collaborative workspaces, at http://www.shared-spaces.com/blog/2005/11/why_closed_does.html.

Michael
Blogger and Collaboration Guy
www.michaelsampson.net