Using Onfolio shared collections to share stuff with your team

I was wondering if anyone out there has tried out using Onfolio shared collections (where multiple users are posting data to a collection file shared on the network) and collection feeds (which let you monitor new items added to a collection) for sharing stuff among members of your team.

We actually use these features internally and its basically like having a very simple and easy to use/setup link blog that the entire team can use for sharing information.   I really love that we can use the shared collection instead of spamming each other with emails.  This lets our emails be more about status and time-critical information, and lets the collection feed contain more FYI-oriented stuff. 

Here's a rundown of how we (the Onfolio team) use shared collections in our day-to day work:

We have a collection on a network drive named Cool Stuff that everyone on the team uses to post things that are of interest to the rest of the team.  Everyone on the team subscribes to the shared collection using a collection feed so that we can all receive notifications about new things team members are adding to the collection.

In our shared collection we have folders created for the various types of information we tend to want to share with each other.  Here's a quick glimpse of the types of folders we have in our Cool stuff shared collection:

• Onfolio Related - Onfolio product reviews, mentions, and technologies we might want to consider using/implementing, etc
• Onfolio Team - shortcuts to team-related files on the network (schedules, spreadsheets, etc), announcements about new tools, pictures that make fun of our VP - Charles :-)
• Industry Related - links to articles about Onfolio competitors and related industries (lots of articles about happenings in the search, RSS, and information management industries)
• Interesting - interesting things found on the web that are not related directly to the company, but some people on the team may find interesting.
• Funny - contains a lot of funny stuff that we run across in our daily feed-reading and Web-browsing.  Boing-Boing and Fark are commonly sources of this goofy information
• Cool Tech Toys - links to new products and reviews that the geeks in the office are drooling over.
• .NET development - interesting articles the developers read related to developing .NET applications.
• Other - anything else that's worth sharing with the team.

With the shared collection, sharing information we find in our daily browsing becomes as simple as F9'ing (F9 is the hotkey for 'Capture') any page we come across that might be interesting to the team.

One thing I really like about using shared collections to share non-critical information with the team is that I don't have to worry about whether I'm annoying the team with my items since I know they won't even see the items until they are reading their feeds and are actually ready to spend a little time consuming non-critical information.  I also know that team members who are not interested in such information, won't be subscribed to the collection feed, and therefore won't be annoyed like they would have been if I had spammed the team with an email.

One last cool trick to mention:

If you are using a shared collection with other team members who are also using Onfolio, its really easy to see the new information posted to collection using collection feeds.  However, if you also want the rest of your company to be able to read the items in your collection without having Onfolio installed, you can combine the shared collection feature with the Folder Publishing feature to create a website of the latest information being published to your collection.  This allows the rest of the company to visit a read-only version of your team's collection website using their browser (they don't even have to know what an Onfolio is).

This turns out to be a really simple way to setup a portion of the team website that always has new content/insight from the members of the team, and makes the project's manager look like he's superman by keeping the team's website constantly up-to-date with new interesting team-related information.  The rest of the company doesn't have to know that its easier to put the item onto the website than it is to send an email. ;-)

To set up the team shared collection website, one of the members of your team just needs to setup the shared collection as a published folder and publish it to a directory on the team website.  An even better idea is to install Onfolio on the team's webserver machine and configure the webserver machine to publish the shared collection.  This ensures that the collection website is always up to date.