Online Collaboration Technologies - Cool Tools And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic Feb18 08

Do you want to connect to upgrade your toolkit for online collaboration with some good tools? Need a wiki? Want to share files and documents with your team? Don't know how to connect all major instant messengers at once?

Photo credit: Michal Mrozek

Not all are new, but they are all great collaboration tools. Here my selected set for this week:

1. Zoho Viewer: Upload, view, and edit documents online, and get feedback from your team
2. Wetpaint: Create free wikis and invite people to collaborate with you
3. Project Office: Manage projects, assign tasks, and create wikis to collaborate with others
4. SproutLiner: Create to-do lists and use to them to manage projects with your team
5. Digsby: Combine multi-protocol IM, email and social networking into one application
6. Weblin: Browser add-in allows you to chat in real-time with the people browsing your same web-page
7. TwitterShare: Share any file up to 10MB as a Twitter post
8. Wizlite: Highlight text on any web-page, and let other people see and modify it

Online Collaboration Technologies - New Tools And Web Services

1. Zoho Viewer
   
   Zoho Viewer is a Zoho Suite application that allows you to upload, view and edit any type of Office document online, enabling friends and colleagues to give you feedback. Without even registering, you can upload or provide a URL for your file (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files), and start editing it online, wherever you are. You can then share it via email, IM, or by embedding it on a web-page, and allow people to give you feedback. Free to use.
   http://viewer.zoho.com/





2. Wetpaint
   
   Wetpaint is a free web-based service that allows you to create wiki pages for free. Just type a name, a URL and a description that best describes it, set the privacy settings, deciding who should be able to edit your pages and your wiki is ready. You and your team can then create text-pages, share any type of file, music, videos and images. Wetpaint is completely web-based and free to use.
   http://www.wetpaint.com/





3. Project Office
   
   ProjectOffice is a web based online project management solution that enables you to collaborate with your team anytime, anywhere. Both individuals and teams can create projects and tasks, assign tasks to project members, track time, expenses and issues and create wikis to collaborate more effectively. The service is completely web-based and free. It requires registration.
   http://www.projectoffice.net/





4. SproutLiner
   
   SproutLiner is a free online to-do list manager service that you can use to organize your projects, but also to create and assign tasks to your team members. It uses drag&drop to let you organize and assign all of your on-going projects, set their priority. To start using it, just go on the page, and type a project name. It is free to use, no registration is needed.
   http://sproutliner.com/





5. Digsby
   
   Digsby is a free web-based application that combines instant messaging, email and social networking. You can mix all of your contacts from MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Gtalk and Jabber, into one buddy list and use email and social networking services like Facebook or MySpace from the same interface. You can have multiple conversations with people from different networks while you check your email. It also offers an embeddable widget for you to chat with your site's visitors. Free beta.
   http://www.digsby.com/





6. Weblin
   
   Weblin is a browser add-in, both for Internet Explorer and Firefox, that you can use to chat in real-time with people browsing your same web-page. After you download a small plug-in, you just have to register to the service for free, and you can then start surfing and chatting with people. The service is completely free.
   http://www.weblin.com/





7. TwitterShare
   
   TwitterShare is both a web-based and a downloadable tool for Windows and Mac, that anyone can use to upload files and share them as regular Twitter messages. Whether you use the online or the software based TwitterShare, all you have to do is to drag&drop any file up to 10MB, provide your Twitter account credentials and click the arrow: your file will be uploaded and posted so that anyone can download it by following you on Twitter. Free.
   http://www.phoreo.com/twittershare/





8. Wizlite
   
   Wizlite is an online collaboration service that allows you to highlight text on any page on the Internet and to share it with anybody. You can create a group on Wizlite and share pages with their selections among a small group of people, and let them add their highlights too. It is available as a Firefox extension or simply a bookmarklet. It is free to use and requires registration.
   http://wizlite.com/

Originally written by Nico Canali De Rossi for Master New Media and first published on February 18th 2008 as "Online Collaboration Technologies - New Tools And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic Feb18 08"