OfficeMedium: Intranet for the Small Business User
We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google's pitches into the corporate world.
But it's always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.
OfficeMedium is a web-based, intranet and collaboration software. It's developed on the Drupal platform so you know it has every possible module available to it for adding on if needed.
Overall, OfficeMedium is a clean, easy to use intranet software. In the new world of the enterprise, every employee will create their own media. OfficeMedium provides an environment to fit with this emerging trend but with enough hooks to satisfy the needs of a business where keeping people in the loop is often mission critical.
This front page has a clean UI with clear demarcation for recent content added or updated; comments; a calendar; a "shoutbox," for quick messages and a basic activity stream.
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The profiles we looked at have just a few fields for web sites but included a blog, personal and miscellaneous sites that the user may include. We'd add several more fields to this section to reflect the real media presence of the user.
The blog environment has built in notifications that may be sent to users. Comments can be turned on, off or set to read-only.
Overall, the social features are pretty decent but could use some improvement. For instance it's difficult to find tags that are associated with the user or the company. A nice, robust cloud tag would be excellent to have front and center on every page. The navigation down the right column clearly identifies what the system can do but we wonder if this could be consolidated in some manner to provide a richer activity stream.
We'd also like to see rich media integration. Services like OfficeMedium can be fertile places for training and sharing marketing materials that may include videos. To have a place for them on the service would be quite handy.
But on a basic level - OfficeMedium works. Perhaps what we suggest is beyond what the small business user is looking for in an intranet. But overall, they do a good job of covering the basics. Here's a summary of what they offer:
- Task and Event Management
- Personal and Group Calendars
- File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
- Contact Management
- Archiving
Further, the service provides the ability to integrate external parties with controls so the outside user can only see what is intended for them. That's a big plus as more often than before, users work pretty closely online with outside parties.
OfficeMedium is $8 per user per month and $1 more per gigabyte used. The first 512 megabytes are free.
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Comments
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Thanks for sharing such an important information. I think Intranet is really best for small business users. Its really essential for task managements, file sharing etc.
Thanks for sharing such an important information.
We implemented Confluence and I never looked back, we also have SharePoint and it is not something I prefer. So if you are looking for an Enterprise Wiki take a look at Confluence. And it is quite cheap (not the cheapest though). By the way I don't work for Atlassian, I'm just impressed by their product(s) and use them almost every day.
Thanks for the review. Intranet can be a boon for small businesses and enable them to derive competitive advantage by intranet solutions. However, the small business owner really needs to plan well and be sure about how she's gonna leverage their power viz. developing a corporate culture, improve workforce productivity, build up time efficiencies, optimize document sharing, etc. And wholesome product reviews such as the above, can definitely help you choose an apt product as you shop around.
It is nice to see that plenty of R&D happening in IT domain for Small Business. In India, OnDemand Business Process applications are on high demand
Your blog is like an encyclopedia for those who want to know more about this. Thanks for the interesting information.
Is Office Medium compatible with Lotus notes? We have lotus notes as our email manager and would it be a problem if it is integrated with OM?
Great info, am very pleased to have found this site.Recommend ''The YES Movie''made by Louis Lautman, stories of today young entrepreneurs.
What's up with all the spam comments?
Axe the spammers; it kills credibility.
Hi Guy's,
I think it's good that plenty of R&D happening in IT domain for Small Business.it's really very interesting and useful information.Thanks for sharing your ideas....
Great article, interesting concept. Looks like we’ll be doing some in depth research. Thanks for the info.
The web site is well designed however the cost is relatively high. Google Docs and Zoho are well established in this market and are free. The market is about to get crowded now that IBM has Lotus iNotes and Microsoft announced Office Live. What's the value add for me to be willing to pay?
Hey guys ! OpenAtrium http://openatrium.com/ is on Drupal too and ways better than OfficeMedium for me. Open source, and completely free...