As part of the experience-based learning project, I went to visit a local tourism development organisation who had a very specific desire to hold discussions within their very small dispersed group of 4 people, share their Outlook contact list and other documents as well as occasionally hold live text chat meetings. When I went to visit, I found that they were willing to experiment, willing to pay for the service if necessary but that it did not have to look good as this was just for internal consumption.
I did not consider Yahoo groups as a solution even though this has been the mainstay mode of communication for many of my international projects. Many people have difficulty getting their email accepted by Yahoo and I don't like the way that the Messenger chat software now comes bundled with a huge amount of other programs which simply take over your machine, not to consider all the stuff going on behind the scenes which we can't see.
Neither did I suggest Moodle which is what my projects tend to use now. That was mainly because while Moodle is a wonderful discussion medium, it does need installing by a technical person and takes server space.
So what I investigated included:
pbwiki (discussions not threaded and too hidden)
Basecamp (with Campfire, great but why pay if a free tool will do the job just as well?)
wikidot.com (great forums but the interface is scary - definitely not for amateurs)
You can see that I was thinking that wikis might be a good idea for this group because they had emphasised that they often work on documents and get confused about which version is the latest one. Unfortunately when I got there I discovered that these documents were mainly application forms and in my experience they tend to be in strictly formatted form which it would be inconvenient to translate into a wiki and then back out again.
When I got there we started discussing
Google groups which has much the same functionality as the good old Yahoo groups and that is what we ended up trying out. Two features which seem worse than Yahoo groups is that it is not possible to arrange your files in folders and even though there is the option of creating a static page (nice idea) using a WYSIWYG interface or html code, I failed to embed
Google Talk in the page and had to make do with a link.
So now we'll see if this arrangement takes off as a discussion medium and reveiew the situation in a few weeks to see if we need to change. I was so pleased that they were willing to take this suck it and see attitude. And I'll have to investigate how they can share their Outlook contact list. (it is possible apparently but I haven't read the guidance yet).
Keywords: Basecamp, Google groups, Google Talk, Moodle, pbwiki, thinkfree, wetpaint, wikidot.com, Yahoo groups, Yahoo Messenger, Zoho
