Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Private IM and Blogs for Teams

Combine the concepts of communities, blogging, IM and outsourcing, blend in a bit of small project ethos, and you might come up with ubergroups.com - On-demand IM and blogs for teams, as they style themselves.

The idea is that a group shares a privte IM and blog space. The blogs can be the ideas one team member has for his/her area, some sample code. I've not played with it, but I imagine that with a little customisation, blogs could even be spec or actual code repositories. There are adhoc and permanent chat rooms - with logs that can be used to document agreement on some action or other, or just for other folks to look at (e.g. for compliance). Team members can be around the globe and need no client software aside from a browser that can do SSL. All traffic to ubergroups is based on 128-bit SSL, with a Thawate cert.

Having had a play, the fim seems based in the US, on the west coast. There seems no option to adjust the time zone. Speed is not too bad, but the features do appear a bit on the light side. Cost, for works at a $5/user per month (for 11+ users ), and a bit less for fewer users. See their pricing page for details.

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