FengOffice: A decent office colllaboration Tool

FengOffice


DO you want a central repository for your firm where people can share notes, documents, tasks, deadlines, statuses, etc. on Customers, Project, Corporate policy,etc? Feng Office (formerly OpenGoo) may be an option you could consider. You could listen to their promotional video,try out the free version first, and then decide if you want their premium version.



Feng office runs off Apache and uses MySql. (You could easily have it running on Xampp covered earlier.

While Google docs may be an alternative, you may feel it is more secure to keep you data on a local server. Besides, Feng Office is customized for office collaboration. It allows configuration of email,document upload time tracking and more.

With FengOffice one creates 'Workspaces' like Customers, Projects, etc. Within the workspace, one may keep relevant information like notes, email, tasks, statuses, links, documents and reports. Accoring to the website, Feng office is the most popular collaboration tool. It is certaiinly an option for small to medium sized firms.

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Lernid: A most useful classroom collaboration tool

Lernid



Jono Bacon, one of the most popular bloggers in the Linux community had a problem conducting online classes. He used IRC, a popular IM client. His students first had to learn how to use IRC and then lean how to participate in the class in real time.
Necessity, being the mother of invention forced him to create Lernid, a nifty classroom tool that facilitators can use to conduct classes and students could use to actively participate in them.


Lernid is a cool tool that presents students with four panes. One pane is a customized calendar used to display session time information. Another displays a pane for displaying slides. The third is used by the student to get the actual lecture of the class in real time ascreensnd finally the last one is used by the student to participate in discussions.

Lernid provides the facilitator to create an event. This is done using a flat file where the facilitator may specify the respective web page, configure an IRC channel and schedule the event start and finish date/time information. The slides for the lecture are provided for Lernid as a pdf document.

During the lecture the facilitator has the ability to change slides or display a website while communicating with the rest of the class with a IRC client.

Lernid is a great and immensely useful tool. While there is scope for more improvement, it is hard for such a product to be commercialized or used on a grand scale. For now Lernid is available only on Ubuntu. Despite Ubuntu's immense popularity, I do not see too many lecture conducted on Ubuntu exclusively for a Ubuntu audience. Lernid also requires that the facilitators are comfortable with using script files. To the non-nerdy, this may be a turn-off.

Maybe Mr. Bacon has no such plans, but I'd like to see it ported to other platforms. I'd also like to see more of the newer technologies/applications integrated into Lernid, like other chat tools, Google Wave, etc. Nevertheless, Lernid is a great concept that I'd like to blossom in the next few years.

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Web 2.0 surfings for 10-21-2008

Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration

• The old story is that only the fittest survive in business, politics and other areas
• We are seeing a new story spread across multiple disciplines.
• It is about cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play an important role.
• Competition takes a back set.
• Human communications media and social organization have coevolved for a long time.
• How did humans band together to get bigger game? We know a new form of wealth emerged.
• Did the people who ate owe something to the hunters?
• Then came the alphabet.
• Then came the printing press and literate people emerged.
• Religion, politics and economies emerged from literacy and then came new forms of wealth.
• Capitalism is a new emergence
• Today every desktp is a printing press, a broadcast station, a community and a marketplace.
• Soon people will be wearing computers linked at speeds beyond broadband.
• Rheingold speaks about the prisoner's dilemma.
• If we are here because of our ansestors competition and cooperation, how are we here?
• Many would reject an offer close to 50-50.
• Instead of innate fairness, our sense of fairness is influenced by our culture.
• Is it true that humans will destroy commons? Yes, in most this is true.
• In many they escaped the prisoner's dilemma by stopping to think that they are prisoners.
• Our notions that a rational self preservation is a dominant factor is not always true.
• People will act to punish cheaters even at a cost to themselves.
• Such people show activity in the reward centers in their brain
• 'Altrusiting punishment may be the glue that holds society together.'
• We may be moving into a very different economic form.
• Sun, IBM, Eli Lilly, Toyota previously competitors are moving toward a more open sharing mode that is detrimental to their self interest by donating to open source, involving the community and suppliers,etc.
• This is how these and other companies like Google and Amazon who deliver APis for others by facilitating openess.
• EBay transformed the Prisoner's dilemma into a assurance game by allowing ranking of both parties.
• Wikipedia uses volunteers to create a free Encyclopedia.
• Bittorrent turns downloaders to uploaders.
• We have not begun to discover all these new trends, but it is time to think about them.
• Political protests are now faciliated around the world with collaboration.
• We may not be better people by collaboration.
• Diseases were believed to be caused by sins until Descartes came along.
• This is going to require effort.

See the presentation here.

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