Online collaboration: fresh additions netspeak Google introduces an experimental search command
Zoho lets you share your desktop with multiple people with ease. In the past, NetSpeak featured several online collaborative tools (such as Vyew, Google Documents and the like. http://www.hindu.com/biz/ 2006/02/20/stories/200602 2000621600.htm). Apart from the ones discussed earlier, several new ones have emerged recently. This weeks column profiles a few of them. Zoho meeting Zoho meeting, an online service meant for sharing your desktop/conducting meetings online, is the latest collaboration tool tested by this author. After initiating an on-line conference via Zoho from your browser, you can invite others to join. Now, your desktop will be available to each of the participants. Whatever you do with the shared desktop will automatically be viewable by other participants as well. And, if you allow, a participant can fire the programs loaded on your machine or edit documents loaded on to it. To initiate a Zoho meeting, access the service (http://meeting.zoho.com) and log in to your account. Now, click on the Create meeting, fill up the fields with the required info and invite potential participants. Once t he set up is ready, begin the meeting by clicking on Start button. At this point you will be prompted to download a client program or the Zoho Firefox extension. Once the Zoho meeting agent is installed on your browser, you will get the message Meeting started successfully, along with an icon on the system tray (for managing the meeting). Once a meeting is initiated on your machine, the invitees can join it by clicking on the link provided on the invitation email. The meeting can be viewed by selecting any one of the three viewers (Activex/JavaViewer/Flash) provided by the service. Once the viewer is loaded on to the attendees machine, she will find the remote desktop shared by you, along with a menu on the top. Unlike the existing desktop sharing programs, Zoho lets you share your desktop with multiple people with ease. One can find multiple uses of this innovative product. For instance, the service can be used to co-edit a document with colleagues from different locations. This product could also be used for product demonstration, customer support and the like. Another notable feature of this service is the facility to embed a meeting on your Blog for helping the visitors directly access it (of course, if it is live). A teacher could find several uses of this facility. Coventi Pages Another collaboration tool encountered by this author is the free online document reviewing service, Coventi Pages (coventi.co m/). The advantage of this service is its comment feature, where the comment on a text snippet moves to the right margin, with direct linkage to the text. This makes navigating the comments and the text tied to it rather easy. Your invited reviewers can comment on any part of the text. To comment, the invitee has to just highlight the text, select the Create option and start typing down her comment. The typed comment will automatically appear on the right margin. For those of you who wish to review documents with multiple reviewers, this service could come handy. The document to be reviewed can either be created with Coventi itself or you can upload the document stored on your desktop (in Word or Open Office format). Safari on Windows Safari, the popular browser from Apple, is now available on Windows too ( http://www.apple.com/safari/ ). The excitement shared by a friend of NetSpeak prompted this author to test it. Though Safari loads faster, unlike other popular browsers, its interface is hardly intuitive. Firefox, with its plethora of extensions ( http://www.hindu.com/biz/2007/02/12/stories/2007021200541700. htm), continues to be this authors favourite. Latest from Google Google always provides you something new to refine the search results. Recently Google has introduced an experimental search command for invoking a timeline search. If you wish to get the historical details of a person or subject or event, Googles timeline search modifier is a valued addition in this regard. For instance, the search string Gandhiji view:timeline will fetch you search results arranged in chronological fashion. This feature is available only if you search via Googles experimental search ( http://www.google.com/experimental / ). Yet another feature being experimented by Google is the keyboard shortcuts for navigating the search results page. If we minimise the mouse use, we can keep our hand healthy! It seems Google has recognised this requirement. Google, in its experimental search page, has introduced several keyboard short cuts for accessing the search results (like use J for the next result, O for opening the current link etc). J. MURALI He can be contacted at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hindu.com/biz/2007/07/02/stories/2007070251101600.htm -- Cordially, Amit Bhatt Windows Live Messenger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo messenger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype ID: amitbhattindia "The difficult we do today, the impossible takes little longer" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Get a free email account with anti spam protection. http://www.bluebottle.com/tag/2 To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
