I’m trying to find a good service for sharing day to day research with my team. I would also like my whole development team to be able to participate so it needs to be private to the public and flexible. So far Ive started a Flickr and a Coursekit account. Coursekit is great but it’s almost too structured for this purpose. I really like that you can post and comment items and the participants are notified like on facebook. I guess Flickr is limited by not being able to share and store PDFs, but it seems to be pretty fluid.
This is a new thing we’re trying to do here so I don’t want to force it on anybody, but I also don’t want to be the only person using it. I’d love if people want to go on and on about any meaning they could attach to images, but I’d also like it if people post things just because they think it’s cool.
Any suggestions, good experiences, lessons learned?
How about Google Docs? You can share/view almost any major text and image file type, invite people to view and comment, chat with Google+ (somehow) share development calendars, etc. It’s pretty slick and it’s free.
I’ve shared folders with clients on Sugarsync and Dropbox - it works well and you can get at files from phones, pcs, etc. By the way I’ve just tired one called insync that syncs your google app storage with a folder on your pc like Dropbox… finally a G-Drive!
For a big camping trip I tried using a wiki for planning, but nobody seemed to want to figure out how to use it and publish on it.
Thanks for the input guys. I guess what I invisioned was something more like an internal blog with photo galleries rather than straight forward file sharing. I want most of the information to be communicated through imagery with brief descriptions.
I would love to have a central story/post that provides the opportunity to comment on a featured idea, but still have access to galleries of images. Something that can be posted to in real time if you’re out in the world and see something interesting.
After talking to my coworker, he suggested an internal social community, which I guess, is closer to what I’m thinking.
Thanks for the advice everybody. I got the research site up and running with Wordpress, and I’m very excited about it. It’s been a little bumpy getting it going through our own server, but I think this is going to be a great tool to organically organize everyday research within the company.
The next challenge is showing how this can really help within our development process to a point where people outside of the designers circle are excited to participate.
