Onfolio Group Blog

Where I am at with Onfolio.

Because I have lived with Outlook for so many years and use indexing form Enfish I like it a lot and it is chock full of information 1.5G! I setup a contact for every person, site or software I use or service I use which is up to 800 contacts now! I have hundreds of to do items and many old ones. Because Outlook has been the centre of my electronic data going way back to the free Win 95 BETA Exchange client I have a lot of stuff in there. The biggest pain for me is my data is in two locations. Where do I put what? Do I use the tried and tested Outlook or start migrating over to Onfolio? At the moment I am experimenting with both. I use Newsgator in Outlook 2003 and it is great for managing posts but reading speed is slower than Onfolio. Even though Newsgator has a newspaper view in outlook it is very slow and you have to action every item with the mouse. I am a keyboard person. If you use the slower but more manageable Newsgator / Outlook folders it beats Onfolio in that view. Newsgator also posts to and handles newsgroups natively. You can get plug-ins to post from Newsgator to Blogs also. Newsgator also has a very well though out process where you sync what you read online and in Outlook. If you have read it on the website then in Outlook it will show up read, multiple locations but not duplicate reading. If Newsgator had a feed reader as good as Onfolio I would use Newsgator. For the casual user I would recommend Onfolio without hesitation as it is easier to use intuitively. 

Outlook has a long history and I am assured I will always have access to data in the future even if Microsoft goes out of business. Too many good people have the ability to extract the entire contents out of Outlook with a few clicks; Onfolio does not have that status yet as far as I know. So the choice on what is used is based on confidence in future data accessibility and that the product will grow at a rate at industry standard. I have spent I guess 1000 plus hours on Outlook and the occasional Exchange server over time so I know it inside out. For someone not familiar with Outlook Onfolio is a good bet if they don’t want PIM items such as Tasks etc. I wonder if Onfolio could do simular to Newsgator and make their product available inside outlook for the feeds but do a better job of it :-) As you can tell despite the hassles over time and the fact I don’t like Microsoft I am fairly hooked on Outlook. I won’t make a change lightly.

 I have been playing with Furl and I see it has a promising future. It can be accessed anywhere over the internet. Outlook can be accessed over the internet also by renting an exchange server licence at a host. Again the magic word is online :-)

 Now outlook can NOT do the following.

 Publishing to a website, Onfolio is very basic at the moment but I think over time it can become better. I have been doing some experimenting with my current blog software of choice www.b2evolution.net and setup Onfolio to publish to that. It even posts the images in the published folder. I am still tinkering but will open up a site for people to play with it. I found this far more useful than publishing to a website in my opinion.

 My choice of images on the internet would be Flikr.com but I am excited and concerned at the same time on how photos are shared and copyright issues. I can publish to b2evolution using a published folder and as I have my own hosting server that appeals to me as I remain in full control of my data and it costs me next to nothing to publish thousands of photos at high resolution.

 Anyway just some thoughts on the difficulty of seeing this exciting software product evolve and the extremely friendly and active beta group compared to testing for Microsoft (I don’t do that anymore, It is not fun and you get no feedback on suggestions or it takes years to see changes like you do in days or weeks)

 I like the party here but will it turn out ok. How much of my life time will it take to change mode to Onfolio? Will the time be worth it and there is a downside risk on data and future proofing what I collect. Everyone hates Microsoft but we all use their products.

 

Onfolio mentioned in a new Preston Gralla book

Author, blogger and all-around interesting guy Preston Gralla has written a new book for O'Reilly called Internet Annoyances that will be available within the next few weeks. Why is this interesting to the Onfolio Group Blog? Well, it's interesting because Onfolio is actually mentioned in the book (not as an annoyance, we presume) and there is even a screen shot of Onfolio on page 113. Though I haven't seen it yet, this chapter appears, based on the table of contents (pdf), to be a section on blogging.  Mr. Gralla told me in an email that he used Onfolio as a research tool during the preparation of this book as well as another book he has coming out later this year. I should start a list of books that were written with Onfolio as a research aid, I'm hearing about more and more of them.

Mr. Gralla is also mentioning Onfolio in the upcoming second edition of his book Windows XP Hacks. Again, we presume that Onfolio isn't being mentioned as one of those Hacks. :)

Skins for Onfolio, and beyond

As I captured a page to Onfolio last night, the little animated briefcase caught my attention. As it opened and closed, capturing little animated pages, I couldn't help imagining it with little eyes and  jagged teeth. Or, perhaps, with a snout, and pointy ears. Or as a dolphin, catching fish tossed by  a friendly trainer...

The point (you were wondering if there is one, right)? is this: as Onfolio gains popularity, people will want to customize the interface. They will want to make it match their workflow or their taste in graphics. They will want their favorite sports team's logo. They will want it to look like Gollum or Chewbacca or Trinity or Einstein or SpongeBob. And they will want to make that briefcase into something else. I sure do.

So. Why not make Onfolio skinnable?

I admit I have no idea of what it takes to make an application skinnable. This is one of the things I like best about information architecture: you can suggest some odd enhancement, then stand back and watch the developers' faces take on looks of horror (sometimes), enthusiasm (sometimes), or exasperation (often).  I can't see the faces on a blog, but I am confident that the software engineers who read this will not be shy about sharing their opinions. Skinnability isn't mission critical, and it certainly won't appear in 2.0, but it's not too early to start thinking about it.

Plug-ins are something to think about, too. Many users like to stretch an application into areas that might not seem appropriate. At CBS I knew someone who used Excel to make his own graph paper and TV control room floor plans. How will people misuse Onfolio? I don't know, but I'll bet they'll want to use plug-ins to extend it, to make it interface to their own custom software, and massage the data in ways no one has thought of. Vertical industries are hotbeds of this kind of stuff. That's one of the big reasons we have XML.

Read the Onfolio Beta Forum and this blog and you'll see that people understand and use Onfolio in very different, diverse ways. Yet, we all seem to get tremendous value out of the same app. How would you tweak Onfolio? What kind of creature is your briefcase? What hellish industry-specific schema are you ready to unleash on the world? What unusual shape would you make the deskbar? The best thing about hearing these ideas is that you get a glimpse into a world you never imagined existed.

Extending Onfolio: Using Onfolio Templates

One of the primary goals I see for Onfolio as a product is the idea of collecting and organizing all aspects of internet research and life.  As our offline lives are merging more and more with our online life, I thought it would be cool to see how far I can leverage Onfolio.

In my mind, collections fall into one of two categories:

1. Permanent Collections:  Collection which house data that you refer to on a daily or at least fairly regular basis.  You might also add new items to these collections regularly.  I think many people use Onfolio for bookmarks....that's a good example of a permanent collection.  These are the collections you mark as favorites for easy access.
2. Task Specific Collections:  Vacation planning, investment planning, historical research, project research are all examples of Task Specific Collections.  You use these collections for a period of time and then they are archived (or at least not often opened or referred to).

I have been traveling more and more for work, and I have started storing some of that travel related  information in Onfolio.  Information like reservations for airline, cars and hotels I get in e-mail are a quick click away from Onfolio.  But what about other items relating to travel?  A collection for a business trip would certainly be a Task Specific collection, I would use it during travel and then archive.  Since I am traveling sometimes 3 or 4 times in a month  I would want to have a way to quickly create a new Task Specific collection for each trip.

I came to the conclusion that what I needed was a template, something I could create once and use again and again.  Onfolio Templates could be a pretty useful feature, let me explain what I did for my Business Travel template.

• First, create a new collection called Onfolio Templates.

• Second, create a new folder in the template collection called Business Travel.

• Next create some sub-folders underneath to hold data specific to this travel.  I created folders for Reservations, Events & Plans, Expenses and Entertainment.

• Finally, I created some lists for packing that I can use again and again.  I used notes to store the lists for Clothing to Pack, Gadgets to Pack, Accessories to Pack.  An interesting alternative would be to save each item on the list as a different note and then use the Collection feed option to create a simple checklist of the items in your collection (you could also use flags).

Once you have this and any other templates created (each as a different folder in your templates collection) you can forget about them...until it is time to take a business trip that is.  When you need to plan a new trip open up the Templates collection and:

• Right click the template folder you want to use;
• Select Export | to new collection...
• Name the collection (I keep my travel collections in a sub-folder of my main collection folder to keep them separate) and save.
• Open your new collection and start adding items.

Use the lists in the collection to help you make sure everything is packed, add your reservations from e-mail or the web, and make sure to pick out some good restaurants to visit when you travel.  When you are done with your trip you have a nice archive of all relevant info...especially if you take some time after the trip to fill in last minute details (like expenses).

Finally (I know its a long post), its pretty easy to share template collections with friend by simply e-mailing or uploading to a file sharing site the templates you have created.  Others can download them and add them to there own Onfolio Templates collection.

Comments feed is now available

The Onfolio Group Blog now has a feed you can use to subscribe to all comments posted on the blog.  There is a link to the comments feed on the right side of this page in the 'Subscribe' section.  You can subscribe to this feed by dragging the link into your Onfolio Feeds tab.

Onfolio Group Blog - Comments feed

This will make monitoring discussions on this blog much easier for me and the rest of the Onfolio team.  Thanks to Agent86 for making this suggestion!

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.

Typepad and Onfolio Folders

Ok it looks like I have a solution to Blog text, links and photos from Onfolio that gives me the presentation I want. Check out this sample site spynews which is fully created to date with Onfolio. It consists of Links, Photos and Notes. 

The thing I can not work out is how to Blog feeds from the newspaper view. I go to the options but it only give a URL space and no login credentials. When I set it up for Blooger.com it works fine. Any ideas?

Examples of posting to Blogs and publishing folders

I was wondering if people could post links of their posts to weblogs from onfolio and name of weblog software being used? On example is  this custom site by Sean

Should we even think about creating a blog using onfolio or should we look for ways to use onfolio to post images an weblogs?

Firefox intergration

Well as stated I have given up on Maxthon at the moment. I have been contacted several times about using Firefox with Onfolio. I relented and reinstalled firefox but could not work out how to get the integration. On the forum after 15 min (Yes I am slow) I found I needed to go into deskbar > preferences > browser.

It is working similar to Internet explorer but a bit slow particularly on newspaper view of feeds. I have a fast computer so it is not a big issue. I guess webmasters will get their act together so Firefox works on all sites. I just installed Firefox on a friends computer after having to clean it out of scum 3 times last year with browser hijacks etc. I hope firefox is as bullet proof as suggested.

Better local copy of webpage and news

Ok I know I and others don't like saving webpages using MHT format. How about capturing as a PDF file. It makes a lot of sense to me. In fact PDF's could be used for many things. Tell me why it is wrong :-)