Earlier today I received an email suggesting I look at OfficeMedium. Coincidentally, one of my regular readers had been asking about using a wiki as a way of letting clients know the progress on their work. A wiki could fulfill that purpose but OfficeMedium looks like it could do a lot more.
Based on Drupal, OfficeMedium has gone to great lengths to keep things simple yet reasonably secure. Given what I’ve said about access control in recent months, this is the first place I look these days. OfficeMedium uses the concept of Clients, Employee and Super User. As regards Clients the User Profile setup page says: “Assign this role, and this role only, to accounts that you are creating for clients. Clients have very limited priviledges in order to keep your data secure. Clients can only create tasks, events, and files, and can only view content that they submit, or that is brought to their attention.” That seems reasonable and covers most eventualities. It could for example be used to upload a CSV/Excel file from the client’s accounting system of choice.
However, I’d really like that OfficeMedium generates an automatic notification to a client once a task has been completed. That requires the addition of some elementary workflow. Drupal has that capability but as far I can tell, that’s not been built into this solution. Yet.
Summary features include:
- Status updates and newsfeeds
- Personal and team calendars
- Task and event management
- Contact management
- File sharing, storage, archiving and organization
- Private messaging, user profiles and shared blogs
Contact management (a la CRM) is a big deal for professionals and OfficeMedium has this as standard. This distinguishes it from say Sharepoint which does not have that same capability out the box. One glaring omission is email inclusion or email alerts. Like it or not, we are all firmly wedded to email and cannot assume that clients will ‘live’ inside this type of environment even if it is possible to get staff on board. The obvious solution is to embed a Drupal based email component.
Pricing is sensible for regular users at $8/month plus $1 per gigabyte of storage. For a 10 user system that’s going to work out something around $1,000 (£630) /pa. However, if you start adding in clients then the cost rises dramatically because as far as I can tell, there are no user price breaks. Given that clients would make occasional use of such a system and are only provided with restricted access, there needs to be a different price point for that type of user and at different user numbers. I’d attempt to go further and work on the basis of some kind of metered usage model as an alternative to assess how clients are using this type of system.
There is plenty to like about this service, not least the sandbox style demo area where you can log in and ferret about as much as you wish. OfficeMedium is a good starting point and as a generic style of intranet it shows considerable promise. Being based on open source means that it should be capable of massive extension and customization. If OfficeMedium wants to make an impact into professional services organizations then that is the direction it has to go.
This is a market segment that will only get more interesting in the coming year as more development organizations start thinking about how they can bring Web 2.0 style components together into coherent services that have obvious business value.
UPDATE: I heard for the company’s director of operations. He says as regards me comment on alerts: “Built-in to the software are email alerts based on a number of different criteria. You also have the option to be alerted via private message from within the software. When viewing a content item, there are three links at the bottom of the node: Subscribe to the current item, Subscribe to the author, or Subscribe to the content type. Each provide notifications for updates made on the system. You could easily subscribe to a task so you can be alerted once it is completed, or amended, or anything at all.”
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