::.. Timing ..::

:: 2003/07/04 ::

First Look: Creatorbase

I received a press release from Erick Mott, CEO of Creator Connection, with the slug "Secure, Internet workspaces for individuals and groups who want to use e-mail and the Web to communicate, get organized, and complete projects."

I was intrigued enough to go take a look, and fiddle with the hosted service. Here's a few observations, and recommendations for Creator Connection and possible users.

Trying out the service requires signing up, and paying the first month's fees ($19.95 monthly through paypal) although there is a 30 day money back guarantee. This is the opposite of how some other competitors (like Groove, to name just one) are set up. eRoom doesn't offer free kick the tires anymore, either, so maybe Erick is just going with the post-dot-bomb flow.

I had a few minor snags, now rectified, which Erick believes were caused by his personally (and wrongly) configuring my space. His tech folks fixed that, and it seems to work as advertised.

Creatorbase is both a community of individual users, and a place to create project-oriented workspaces. You can in principle become involved in the community of people, although at the moment there aren't very many people in the community, and try as I might I never could figure out how to search for people with specific interests. All I was able to figure out was how to search for users by name -- not very helpful. Presumably, this social tool aspect of the service will be amplified in the future.

Regarding the service as a project workspace system, there seems to be a great deal of (useful) emphasis on access controls -- very sophisticated approach to manage policies in groups and subgroups -- that makes the system attractive to complex projects. Consider the case where you would like to have a project management team within a larger project team with more access rights than the group as a whole. Likewise, there is finegrained control of documents managed within the system, including provisions for locking docs, checking them out via email, versioning, and a routing for document approval -- very cool.

Another feature is offline folder synchronization -- which seems to work (I think) but also requires manually synching when connected. This will support offline access to project information. I haven't extensively fiddled with it -- synching, disconnecting, modifying content, reconnecting, attempting to synch -- but it is in principle supported.

Calendars and task objects are supported, although with only a limited synch capability for the calendar entries for Outlook and none for tasks.

Creatorbase seems to support three flavors of unrelated user information -- profiles (the information that subscribers enter into the system), contacts (which are like Outlook contacts), and users (people invited to join groups). These may interrelate in some way, but I don't understand how, which made any use of these types of information confusing to me (but then again, I'm easily confused).

The folder metaphor is extensively exploited -- perhaps too extensively -- in the Creatorbase UI. Nesting of folders inside of folders is fine as a technique for partitioning, but Creatorbase lacks a top level status "dashboard" associated with projects or subprojects. There is a so-called "dashboard" but it is really just a folder of links to other information, and can't be presented like a project "dashboard". My bet is that use of the system will require way too much moving up and down in the folder hierarchy. I got lost several times. The solution may be to provide a different sort of navigation and view management, like a Explorer-like folder widget, and something like Lotus Notes "views" so that subordinate information (such as the postings in a discussion folder, or the tasks in a task folder) can be presented as a scrollable list of records at a higher level in the folder hierarchy. This would allow real dashboards to be created, and would minimize up and down movement.

There is no way to use Creatorbase as currently configured to support large online communities with anonymous users. Erick states, in fairness, that his service is not targeting that need. But it seems a shame to me that this limitation has been imposed. I recommend that the company consider creating a special class of user, with very limited acces rights -- namely the ability to read various docs and information, and the ability to create (moderated) discussion entries -- and then allow open access to public groups. Not only does this open up a larger market for Creatorbase, it would create a viral form of marketing, since community creators could simply post the URL to public communities on other websites, or in emails, and avoid the pain of actually registering casual users. Think it over, Erick.

Creatorbase looks to be an affordable solution considering its rich content management capabilities. $19.95/month allows you to invite up to 50 users to participate in multiple projects. For the SOHO or small business market, this is a true bargain. Creator Connection has a way to go on the UI, but a few new features would certainly remove my concerns in that regard. And the notion of integrating both project workspaces and social tool-style community interaction is a great idea, full of promise.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/4/2003 09:15:01 AM [link] ::
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WSJ Bot on AOL

I stumbled across the new (I think) Wall Street Journal bot at www.wsj.com. Pretty cool. I have been using the bot (which looks like ActiveBuddy to me) to keep track of Starbucks rise in the past week (one of my few smart investments in recetn years).

If you're an AIM user, simply start an IM with WSJOnline. The rest is obvious.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/4/2003 08:18:31 AM [link] ::
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Wireless Communication on Planes: A Near Term Thing?

I've always thought it was lunacy to prohibit cell phone (or other wireless device) use on airplanes. The anecdotal baloney that cell phones could stymie the navigational and communication systems on planes have never been proven, and never replicated by the FAA.

And even more idiotic is the fact that the authorities were prohibiting toenail clippers and tennis rackets as a security measure, but letting people bring supposedly dangerous radio transmitters on, and asking them politely to turn them off. Wouldn't a terrorist simply turn it on, and hope that the plane crashed?

A recent WSJ article suggests that the FAA and FCC are revisting this policy, thank god.

This means that the (possibly attractive) dead zone that we enter on airplane travel may soon be a thing of the past.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/2/2003 04:52:07 PM [link] ::
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Does Software Reuse Matter?

An executive report I wrote for Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management Service has been published (at long last). To read the executive summary, and get a free download of the entire whopping report (30 pages!)click here. Features interviews with Tom DeMarco and Kent Beck.

PS The answer to "does software reuse matter?" is yes and no. "Yes,"on a bottom-up, small scale, with individuals and small teams sharing components and local knowledge, but "No" relative to the large-scale, top-down concept of software reuse that was prevalent in the 80s and 90s.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/2/2003 03:10:01 PM [link] ::
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Intuit Tech Support Horror

I have been through a hellish few weeks, updating a lot of software on my PC, as well as working like a maniac, so I have been really bad at blogging. But I must get the following off my chest.

Today, I had a chat session with an Intuit tech support guy where he suggests that printing was a feature that had been disabled for the release of Quicken Premier I have. Come on. That's the weakest bull I have ever heard.

The support area offers a search capability against the "knowledge base" and I got 757 hits for "Adobe Acrobat 6.0 printing problem with Quicken 2003 Premier" -- none of which had anything to do with my keywords.

Time to sell Intuit short.

But even more amazing was a pop-up survey trying to determine the level of satisfaction I had for the support experience.

Yikes.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/1/2003 05:01:24 PM [link] ::
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