Raju vegesna’s Blog

Personal Information Management vs groupware/collaboration softwares

I see lot of softwares calling themselves as ‘Collaboration Suites’ or ‘Groupware Suite’ while they are actually not. Most of these softwares provide features like Email, calendar, contacts etc and they call them selves as groupware software.

Well, these are just Personal Information Management softwares. Even softwares like MS Outlook come under personal information management category. When Outlook is mated with Exchange, it does have a bit of groupware functionalities, but still lacks some core groupware functionalities like presence.

For software to be called as a collaboration suite, it has to provide a workspace where a group of people can collaborate/share on a project/task etc. When a software just provides features like Email, Tasks, Calendering, favorites etc it is just personal information management software. But when the same features are shared with a group of people - like group calendaring, sharing favorites, group tagging of favorites, sharing contacts etc, it becomes a groupware/collaboration software.

I hope to see some right terminology being used.

Raju

Zoho Team

www.zohovo.com

‘Web 2.0′ is definitely a hot word on the web. Googling ‘Web 2.0′ has 247 Million results. But is it as popular as it sounds? Probably not. I spend some time this weekend calling few of my frieds in different areas of work (in IT itself) asking about ‘Web 2.0′. Most of them respond by saying ‘What the heck is Web 2.0?’.

Well, unless these folks are looking at blogs regularly, I am not surprised they didnt hear about it. Before even going there, we probably should ask ‘What percentage of users know/read blogs’.

While this is the case with ‘Web 2.0′, people started takling about ‘Web 2.1′ already. If someone comes with 2.1 concept and bloggers start writing about it, it’ll be a big numbering mess on the web.

Raju

I was looking forward for a Google RSS reader and finally it is out, but uncooked. Starting with the browser issue (it doesnt work on IE - I am surprised they call themselves web company without supporting the most popular browser) followed by the OPML file import issues (it takes forever to import from OPML).

I also dont see a closer integration with Gmail too. My Gmail is couple of clicks away. Coming to the features, reading a feed itself is very slow - even the ones that already has been read (damn this is painful). When the reader is from Google, I did expect a search inside the feeds. I can go on with many other issues, but let me give them a chance….it is still in Beta.

It does have its share of positive points. I like the way the feed list is shown. Searching for new content and adding them to the feed is easy and very helpful without visiting every site.

I do hope they would provide my Gmail conversations as feeds (and vice versa).

Will I use Google Reader? - Not yet.

Raju