Are you familiar with video games? If you have some slightest ideas about it, you’ll know what’s single player, and what’s multiplayer. In short, Pagico has been a single player for the past few years. And so the question is, what if Pagico does multiplayer (team collaboration)? What if you can use all the current data management features with your teammates?
Where we are right now
Right now we’re living in a very fast paced world. That’s why we need productivity tools to help us achieve better and more goals in a shorter time. That’s exactly why Pagico was designed: to help you memorize and organize the large amount of information accumulated throughout your daily work, so that you can stay organized, be productive, and always have a clear mind. Those words sounds really like advertisement tag lines. But surprisingly, Pagico is able to deliver those promises by doing the following things:
- Provide a brain-like structure for data storage, so that if you want to save something, let’s say a project, just create a topic and throw stuff in. Without much effort, everything are already in one place. And when everything is in one place, you can just have a clear mind and get the work done.
- Provide a highly efficient categorizing way, so that if you want to categorize some projects or events, just go ahead and tag it. And when you want to look for something, just dig through the multi-level dynamic tag browser. There is no complicated folder structure for you to work with or maintain. No time or energy wasted.
- Provide an easy way to handle tasks, so that you can just go ahead and write todo lists, without worrying about having too many lists thanks to the flowchart. Or, you can implement your GTD system in Pagico without a problem, too.
- Provide a user-friendly and elegant environment so that you can keep the previous three points effective for a very long time, without much effort. In another word, staying organized is easy and of course, rewarding.
As you can see, that’s where we’re standing right now, and we’re doing some pretty good job here in terms of creating a user-friendly personal data environment. We’re very happy for that, and we have to thank you for that, too. Without your consistent help and valuable feedbacks, we couldn’t have done this at all for sure.
What if Pagico does team collaboration?
We’ll keep working hard to make sure Pagico gets better and better, but it’s time to have some new goals in the higher level. We actually made a promise to ourselves a very long time ago, that is when the personal data management part is completed, we go ahead and create a very robust collaboration part so that the same level of management functionality and user experience can be brought to groups of people in additional to just individuals. We want to create a collaboration solution that is designed for small sized groups (2 – 20), and is very easy to use yet extremely flexible to fit various group settings.
Why do we need another collaboration tool?
Well, the answer is: there isn’t one collaboration tool that is good enough yet. All of those web-based collaboration apps, some of them are really good in user interaction design, user experience, etc. But they are all missing one point. That is, the BIG gap between your data and the cloud in your browser. You still need to upload your files to get them shared, and download before you can use (yeah I know things like Google Doc. But what about a Photoshop file? Can you work that in a web app??). You still need to re-upload when you have a new version, and download a new file when you can see other’s updates. And what we’re bringing, is a truly transparent collaboration solution, so that you can just work on your resources, and get them available to your teammates with just a click. You can also see their updates in a very timely manner, and work on shared data just like you would with your own. Now how does it sound?
What to expect?
- User Experience: We’ll make sure that it’s using a consistent user interface for the collaboration features so that you have little to learn. Since it’s going to have most or all of the existing data management features, it is going to be as powerful as it gets.
- Flexibility: The collaboration features are going to be really simple, generic, and flexible, so that it could fit into various settings. For example, although it’s designed for small sized groups (2 – 20 participants), a mid-sized group could have multiple channels for different sub-groups.
- Cloud-based Sync: All the data will be synchronized through our cloud servers. So that you’re not restricted to your local network when comes to collaboration.
- Local network server? It is a possibility, but don’t hold your breath. Even if we are going to do it, it’ll come after the Cloud-based collaboration being finely tuned and really stable.
- The Inbox Sync feature that was planned for v4.1? That is currently suspended, because it is very likely that this new collaboration solution may shape the Inbox Sync feature a lot. So we’ll see what’s the best to do after this.
When to expect?
Implementing a collaboration solution with so many requirements is an astounding job. But fortunately, we’ve got it planned when we were implementing the framework in Pagico v4.0. So literally most of the pieces are already in place, which made the implementation very easy. So, we’re planning to implement this collaboration solution in the next minor release, the v4.2. That means it’s going to be available for beta testing very soon, and that also means that it’ll be a free update to all the v4 customers. Sounds great, doesn’t it? 😉
We want to hear from you!
Although the work has already begun, it is still a good time for you to pitch in and let us know your experiences and ideas! Let us know your ideal features and caveats, so that we can make it right the first round.