I got a overwhelming response to my post on Enterprise Knowledge Vacuum. People sent me ‘thank you notes’ for alerting them about enterprise knowledge. Most of those readers wrote email asking to suggest the products for document and communications management in their office. I have reviewed few of the emerging products in this area. I hope thise web based products will be of some help to you. Whether you’re putting together an important document or emails or client contacts or manage projects, these services will help get everybody involved. I know many other proprietary, opensource, freeware, collaboration, workflow and knowledge management enterprise products - like Microsoft Groove, Tikiwiki, Oracle Collaboration Suite, IBM Lotus Notes and many others. But this is the first lot of Watch-Out reviews for you.

(For your information, these are not paid reviews)

Approver.com

Anyone who has collaborated with multiple people on a document knows the true meaning of frustration. You have to distribute the file to the entire group, convince every person to review it by a certain date and time, and get them all to sign off on it. Approver.com lowers the pain quotient considerably. Upload the document you want to track, and the site routes it to everyone who needs to see it. It also lets you set deadlines for reviewing the document, and keep track of approvals and comments. Approver.com works with a number of apps, including Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, and Open Office; alternatively, you can use the site to create documents, and have your colleagues read them online.

Approver.com makes it easy to share documents with coworkers.

You can use Approver.com to create or upload documents, then invite friends or colleagues to provide feedback. You receive alerts when others review your document, leave comments or upload new versions.

If you ever sent someone a document as an email attachment and wondered if it ever got there, Approver.com offers a handy alternative.

Pbwiki.com

Though the whole world seems to know about Wikipedia these days, many people and organizations don’t realize how useful it can be to build their own wiki. In business settings, it’s an ideal way to share information within a group. For individuals, it’s perfect for planning a get-together, organizing a fan club, or sharing memories with family members. Pbwiki makes creating miniature versions of Wikipedia a breeze. The site’s simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki–you don’t need to have any HTML know-how–and getting others in on the editing action. A wiki lets you put your text on an easy-to-edit website
and have your coworkers make changes directly!

Zoho.com
The Zoho service hosts a wide array of collaboration applications (both free and priced). Through several office applications, it is trying to gain some foothold in the highly competitive web-based office suite segment. The free product, web-based wordprocessor ZohoWriter, developed for creating/sharing documents on-line, is one of its kind. It has almost all the features found on similar products (like Writely).

Another office-suite component worth a mention is the ZohoSheet, an on-line worksheet package. The product allows you to create/share spreadsheets in your browser. It supports facilities such as graph creation tool and mathematical functions like LCM, sum, log, sumsq (for sum of the squares of a set of numbers) and sqrt.

Zoho Writer can export files to many formats, including Word DOC files, Rich Text Format (RTF), text files, PDF, HTML, the Open Office SXW extension and OpenDocument’s ODT format

Zoho is, like Google Apps, a Web-based productivity suite. The biggest difference between them will be obvious the first time you visit the Zoho home page. Unlike Apps and most other would-be Office killers, the Zoho suite has all of the applications you expect: a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation package, e-mail, and a calendar. There are also Zoho modules for databases and managing projects.

If you enjoyed reading my posts, then please Click Here to Subscribe to my RSS feed.