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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