Collaborative outlining

Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 15, 2010 at 12:47 PM

We’ve just started playing with the really very impressive Kerio Workspace (http://www.kerio.com/workspace). For a piece of beta software, it’s remarkably polished, and it’s got some amazing features that make solutions like SharePoint and Alfresco look slow, dusty and over-engineered.

For all that, it’s got plenty of things that could do with improvement - the Search function supports Unicode (which is great), but doesn’t allow you to isolate branches/folders. It doesn’t have tags or categories. It does have web preview of attached documents, though (which works amazingly fast). It does drag ‘n’ drop in some places, but not in others. It doesn’t allow you to set new defaults (for e.g. colours, fonts etc.), nor does it support templates (yet). But for all that, it’s truly impressive (apparently Kerio have been using it themselves in-house for quite a long time now, which would account for its stability).

It’s not really a personal solution - although currently I’m using it as one, while I test it! It runs fast enough on my HP laptop! - but it is an exceptional example of where collaborative outlining could be going. No, I don’t have any interest in the company as such! I’m just pleased to find (after exploring goodness knows how many different collaborative solutions, including wikis, CMS, DMS, intranet/extranet servers etc. etc.). I’m convinced that for corporate purposes, you really can’t get away from a hierarchically organised system (hence outlining), and apart from Telepark Wiki, for which I have a residual fondness, this is by far the best attempt at a convenient solution I’ve come across.

Plus it’s cross-platform (yup, Windows, Mac ‘n’ Linux too!).