Saturday, 29. November 2008, 23:59:47
knowledge software, group chat
PeerAware can be categorized as
knowledge software and in reality this means that some companies use it for sharing information among employees. With PeerAware 1.04 just released I decided it was about time we changed the name and USP into something more meaningful. A year ago we started out with "Desktop to Desktop Search", but that was not really something that described the program that well, in fact it was a minor feature that most users took for granted, or just did not care about. What they do care about though is the group chat. And as a bonus the ability to share files.
But my job in improving this is to make sure that people get the overall concept and possibilities available. My response: Focus a bit on the big picture, but start out simple. So now PeerAware is called: PeerAware Group Chat - Enterprise knowledge software.
In reality focus is still the same though, making a great group chat program with collaboration tools available to make collaboration between offices and employees simple and effective. And make the information every employee has easily accessible.
Saturday, 25. October 2008, 18:56:20
group chat
Finally PeerAware 1.03 is available, and this time it is the
group chat functionality that is in focus.
The most important feature introduced is instant messaging notification windows. Most people run PeerAware in the background, and only check it once in a while to see what discussions have occured, and if they can contribute with anything. But sometimes it is nice to be able to react more promptly to questions. With the notification popup windows this becomes much easier. Just like Windows live messenger, whenever there is activity in the chat windows you can get small notifications in the shape of popup windows in the lower right corner.
At the same time sound alerts are introduced, but these are disabled by default. If you want to you can go to general options and enable these and you will get sounds played whenever a notification popup is displayed.
Thursday, 18. September 2008, 16:38:25
Just today PeerAware was released in version 1.01 fixing a couple of major bugs, getting support for Italian and adding a few usability improvements to the
virtual whiteboard.
Peeraware is software which makes it easy to create a
knowledge sharing network and allows any user to do so. Based on p2p technology PeerAware makes it possible for anyone to share their documents, reports and spreadsheets with coworkers.
Group chat makes it easy to keep in touch and follow discussions taking place within the company. The shared whiteboard helps visualize discussions and allows people to work together in real-time on diagrams and drawings across locations or over the internet.
Anyway, hope you try it out, this is a great new release. Enjoy!
Regards,
Jonny
Wednesday, 20. August 2008, 17:30:16
shared whiteboard, virtual whiteboard, online whiteboard
A bit strange how you can work for ages on something without really using it. Last weekend I needed to illustrate something for a friend while chatting with him in a PeerAware workspace. Well, I worked a lot on the
online whiteboard, and we used it extensively, but only for testing. So when we were using it for real we found a real annoyance in how we would steal focus from each other while drawing our diagrams. The good news is that it is fixed. Now behaviour is better than ever, and is much more usable.
Sunday, 20. July 2008, 18:41:41
shared whiteboard
Lately I have been getting more users for PeerAware, and it is great to see people starting to use the program and the reports coming in. Improvements have been made both to the
shared whiteboard and to the group chat. A lot of work has been done to simplify the user experience, but at the same I am probably ending up adding even more complexity when I focus on more of the knowledge management and information sharing aspects of PeerAware.
Basically the next idea is to be able to create a questions and answers repository based on discussions in the group chat, and then save the discussion to a shared folder so that the information can be re-used.
Monday, 7. July 2008, 20:43:40
shared whiteboard, p2p, file sharing, collaboration
...
PeerAware is my personal project, and what I have been working on most evenings the last couple of years. It is still flying under the radar but I hope this will change as I am about to release version 1.0 in the next few weeks.
But meanwhile it is in development, and focus is on making it simple and fun. So what is it?
First of all it is a peer to peer program for sharing documents. Nothing special in that, there are dozens of programs that does this, but there is a difference: Shared documents are indexed by content, meaning it will be possible to find the word, powerpoint, excel, pdf, openoffice documents you have written by searching for words in the document text. Basically the intention is to have people who work together connect in a
knowledge sharing network, where they can make their documents and files available to advance the knowledge within a company.
PeerAware is focused on group collaboration. Users connect in a
shared workspace where they can chat with everyone connected. A great feature is the
shared whiteboard which makes it possible to draw diagrams together in real-time on a shared drawing surface. Simply push a button in the workspace and you are drawing while other users have been invited to join you in your drawing efforts. The whiteboard is implemented in html and javascript, so it is really a web application running on top of a p2p network.
A PeerAware workspace can also be extended with a custom script written in html and java script to create games or applications. A tutorial is available showing how you can communicate across the p2p network and communicate with other workspaces users in real-time. The
p2p javascript tutorial shows how a version of rock, paper scissors was implemented.
Anyway, take a look, I hope you will like it!
WIDGETIZE