AquaMinds Weblog

During the last two years, one of the many pleasures of testing NoteShare has been the ongoing discussions (collaborative exchanges) with users about their use of NoteShare and where it fits into their workflow models today and in the future.  NoteShare's easy to use sharing model is one of the many reasons the software can be adopted quickly to augment current practices.  Certainly the "instant" sharing aspect makes NoteShare very convenient as well as compelling.  But it's exactly this on-demand sharing capability that allows NoteShare users the freedom to enhance, encourage and extend group productivity by accelerating the adoption of collaborative techniques.

One of my favorite NoteShare applications is the group or team inbox.  By using NoteShare as a multimedia message center, the team can gather all the working parts of a project in one place just like a shared inbox only richer.  The process of creating the shared notebook can be highly structured (pre-built with templates) or it can be facile and fluid while allowing each team member to add their own pages and sections as the need develops.  And most importantly, the group doesn't have to change or replace an existing tool set to benefit from using NoteShare in this way.

In fact, NoteShare fits right in by allowing team members to leverage what they already know.  As the project develops, the shared notebook becomes both an active tool while also capturing the team's operational knowledge along the way.  The archival feature is built-in since notebook pages can contain virtually any type of information including outlines, voice memos, QuickTime media, web pages, components (Java and Flash), Word documents, PDFs and any other kind of application file (attached or linked).  In this way, NoteShare captures and records the team's progress in chronological order while serving as a searchable storehouse of operational knowledge and expertise.

Using NoteShare to aggregate team information quickly becomes second nature, easy and very productive.  And, it encourages creativity and information exchange as well as discussion while remaining flexible enough to handle almost any kind of organizational structure.  It's truly like an inbox for your imagination.