Spacelets from outer Netherlands

You may either work completely from within the office suite that will take care of basic workflows as well as versioning of documents you work on during a session. It also comes with an AJAX base web client. In the background there's a J2EE based server built on top of Apache Tomcat and the PostgreSQL that takes care of the document store.

They've got a time restricted demo VMware appliance that you can download here. They've got a short presentation video that shows the basics of the web client.

A nice idea is to deliberately open a workspace and get a tab at the bottom for it. A workspace in a way maps on TWiki's webs. But instead of having to deal with all webs at the same time every user can just open ``his'' workspaces in O3Spaces and concentrate on them. Despite all the technical merits that come with O3Spaces I like those little usability improvements that make a big difference.

The portal page of a workspace is build up from little areas where specific information is listed (latest changes, recent comments, etc). But why do they have to create yet another XXXlet name for it: ``Spacelets'' from the outer regions of Ursa Minor. So spacelets are in a way portlets. Besides other conceptual parallels, they share the same potential for gooseflesh.

The screenshot shows three pulldown menus to select a workspace, files and discussions in it ... which makes me wonder how this interface scales when the number of documents and discussions in it grows. Unfortunately the presentation does not show how documents can be organized, e.g. classifying and tagging them. The spacelets only show latest changes but don't provide a path to find ``relevant'' information whatever that is. So as good as O3Spaces might be in collaborative document creation it may lack components essential to manage long-term knowledge.

Anyway, go ahead download the test version and make up your own mind.