
Like many writers, I'm online most of the time. It's sort of a career necessity. And since writing, for me, is often a collaborative process, I evaluate online tools, like Collective X, for ease-of-use, practicality, and whether or not it will help me be more productive. The fact that it offers a discussion board, a calendar and file storage is good, but so does a Yahoo group. It's scalability sounds promising - groups from 10 to 10,000. That's a pretty impressive claim. Usually, enterprise-level collaboration products are nightmares of complexity, like SharePoint. Collective X's use of open source technology (Ruby on Rails) may help it avoid some of those pitfalls. I'll write more about it once they release the public beta in a few weeks.
You do need to be part of a group to join Collective X, so take it off your radar if you're working alone. In that case, go to Accomplice. I've begun using it and so far, I'm very pleased. I'll be posting more about Accomplice at a later date.





