Here is a nice review by Dave Johnson
Thanks to the various online collaboration tools out there, you have one less way to contract Swine Flu. Throwing its hat into the let’s-avoid-touching-or-meeting-face-to-face ring: Collaber, a shared collaboration space that tries to replace a bevy of communication and sharing services, including file sharing, chat, calendars, and more.
Thank you Dave.
At Collaber we have enabled Enterprise Package recently. We already have Free, Basic, Premium packages which are billed per year. Enterprise Package will cost just $3 per user per month. It provides unlimited data transfer and storage at the cost of $0.4 per GB*.
Enterprise Package will have the following advantages
For more information click here.
*Storage will be charged for per GB per month. Data transfer is charged for usage on per GB basis.
With in last 1 month we have very good progress in Collaber On Web. By the end of this week we are planning to finish all major functionality.It is available for public access at http://www.collaber.net If you want security then you can use HTTPS also. HTTPS version will be little slower then the HTTP version due to well known reasons.
Even though we don’t suggest to do any actions on production workspaces, you can normally check the following tools already.
Rest of the tools will be available by this week end.
Happy Collaboration.
Even though there are many collaboration software out there, not all of them provide the ability to edit a document collaboratively. This limitation exists in Collaber & Groove to some extent.
Recently I have read a post about one software that does it in a simple way.
Even though this functionality looks simple, it is much complex than we think. Let us analyse more.
In Collaber any member in the workspace can create a Note in Notepad Tool. This note can be edited by any other member. Every time changes are saved, a new revision will be created. In case of conflicts which is very common in a loosely couple architecture like Collaber & Groove software will take side of one member depending on the role and who got into the workspace first.
With in the Note there is no indication of which member changed what.
Now, lets think about the problems we have in implementing the solution like the one mentioned in that link. In that solution every user will choose a color. And what ever he does will be presented in that color as a background.
If we consider major word processors like MS Word and, Open Office they already provide support for revisions, tracking changes and comments.
As of now we are looking for way to prevent reinventing the wheel. Because no mater how much functionality we add to the Text Editing features of Collaber or any other software, we will never reach the functionality of MS Word & Open Office. So user will always in looking for more text features which are already existing in those software.
I personally think that we need to find a way to integrate OpenOffice or MS Word into Collaber desktop version. Even then there will be an issue of Collaber On Web. We can not have all the functionality of OpenOffice or MS Word in a webbased application. What solutions we have there? It is still a open question.
Before v1.2.0 we used to have a tool called “Applications”. Even though we have released it long time back, none of the users actually know how to use it. It is primary targetted for developers to develop their own collaborative applications on the top of Collaber.
We have disabled the tool in v1.2 to fix some important bugs in it. Today we have finished all the issues with the tool and we are ready to declare them as production ready.
We have developed two new applications using this tool.
Sites is a complex application to develop. But for end users it is very easy simple to use. It is similar to Googe Sites. It captures most of the functionality of Goolge Sites.
We have chosen to develop this application because we want to show the power of Applications Tool to the other developers. We want to tell them it is possible to build very complex application on Applications Tool. Source code of this application will be released soon.
Groove 2007 have a tool which is not present in Collaber. That is Meetings Tool. So we thought of developing it on Applications tool. And we have successfully completed it with the least amount of code. It is very easy to use straight forward application.
Here are the screen shots of the both the applications. They will be availble for download after next release of Collaber.
We will develop more applications in future. Collaber will have Application Store, similar to Apple’s Apps Store for IPhone Applications. Developer can write their own applications and sell them in Collaber Application Store.
For more information of Application development on Collaber contact us.
Here are some screen-shots of Collaber On Web during its development stage. One of the interesting point of this project is that Collaber On Web will look exactly like Collaber Client on Desktop. We have chosen this GUI to minimize the development time and give uniqueness about our Collaber. If you are a developer you will notice that it is done using GWT.
If you are not aware of Collaber On Web here are the short list of features.
While total world is celebrating Christmas, we on the other side busy with doing bug fixes and enhancements to final beta of Collaber. After this version Collaber will go into non-beta stage and will be ready to be purchased from website.
What’s new:
We will be back to you in 2009 with this update.
We are glad to announce that Collaber v1.1.26 is been just released very recently. This version addresses almost all old bugs, and added new features. You can update your previous Collaber installation from ‘help’ menu, without any loss of previous data. Collaber 1.1.26 works on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.
New Features/Enhancements for this version:
We thank the users for sending us valuable bug reports and suggestions. Awaiting for your valuable feedback about this release too.
Backup Tool
Till now users of Collaber has one problem. How to backup the workspace and restore it when some thing unwanted happens?
We are introducing new Backup Tool that will work like your system restore point.(If you are using Windows). Similar to Windows system restore point, you can create restore points in Backup Tool. Every time a restore point is created, all your workspace data at that time is securely backed-up in the server. This data involves every aspect of your workspace, including all files and attachments.
At any point of time in future you can restore your workspace to any restore point you have created. Immediately all members of this workspace will be switched back to previous restore point.
This tool will be released in next major release, and mostly will be offered in premium packages only. (Packages are not finalized yet).
Application Tool
This is the tool that puts Collaber ahead of many other competitors. Application Tool is Collaber’s answer to Groove’s Forms tool.
Application Tool is an environment to develop your own tools. It is similar to any server side scripting environments like PHP,JSP,ASP etc.
The main difference is that Collaber Application Tool uses Javascript as its server side scripting language. This has tremendous advantage. Developers just need to know HTML, Javascript to develop rich collaborative applications.
Collaber Application Tool contains built in Javascript engine(Rhino from Mozilla) and have all Collaber objects exported to this Javascript engine.
You are not limited to just Forms and Views, but develop any application ranging from simple Javascript based Game to a full fledged web application using Collaber as your backend database.
You like Javascript frameworks likes JQuery, Prototype? Great, continue using them inside Collaber. Use all latest Web2.0 technologies and even AJAX if required.
Interested? What to know more? Get in touch with us in Collaber.
We are happy to announce that Collaber 1.1 Beta is released and available for download.
All major changes are mentioned in previous article.
The major enhancements are stability, reliability, access from any system and Web/Mobile Collaber in future (under development).
On the occation of this important release, we want to give a commitment to our users. Any bug in Collaber 1.1 Beta reported by our users will be fixed with in 48hr of reporting it. This offer do not apply to enhancements and features.