Thursday 14 August 2008

Clearspace

As part of our Innovative Communications project, we've been looking at what software to introduce and support to handle blogs, wikis, collaboration, social networking etc. One of the products we've been looking at is Clearspace. We had a demo of it yesterday, and I was very impressed. It's a collaborative piece of software which integrates discussion forums, blogs, wikis, documents. and social groups. Because it's so integrated, it makes searching for common interets so much easier. You can search for a term and it will not just search tags, but text and bring you results from blogs, discsuion threads, documents, personal details, wikis etc. It's used by some big companies - the BBC "Have your say" site uses it, as does the Apple Support forum site.

We're evaluating it at the moment, and so far it's proved relatively easy to install and use. It could be quite disruptive if we decide to implemt it, but that needn't be a bad thing.....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've played around with ClearSpace too. It's an excellent product and the developers have to be one of the best software companies that I've ever had the pleasure to deal with.

It also has some fairly tight integration in to OpenFire (UoS MyChat) which could present some interesting opportunities to you.

Brennig said...

ClearSpace was one of the collaborative tools that I evaluated at NERC.

Outside of my personal feelings for the product, ClearSpace delivers a near identical level of functionality as the biggest branded tool (SharePoint).

However the ease with which ClearSpace can be installed, configured and maintained deliver a significant win over SharePoint.

However... as I'm no longer at NERC... I loved ClearSpace.

Anonymous said...

Glad you liked the demo Chris! It's always good to hear that the electrons we're pushing around using our keyboards are actually useful and interesting to people!

I hope it is disruptive. :)