The Ubidesk project exited beta after its first public beta release in August 2009

The day finally came.

It’s now official that Ubidesk is out of beta. It has been 20 month of hard working since the initial start of the Ubidesk project in May 2008, and we are excited to see its public release.

Having the R&D team overseas, we started the Ubidesk project to address the communication and collaboration challenges between our headquarters in Silicon Valley and the R&D team in South Korea. We wanted a better collaboration tool than email or some other tools such as Google Apps, wikis, and project management software.

We observed that document collaboration and task management were crucial for successful teamwork.  In fact, how to coordinate documents and tasks for efficient team collaboration was even more critical; however, none of the tools available then offered a practical method of effective organization.

At Ubidesk, not only can you create documents and tasks, but also you can link them for better organization.

Ubidesk has a long list of cool features for collaboration; however, we know that it’s still far from perfect. We will keep working on it.

Leaving beta, we are thrilled to move forward.

File revision, Online document editing, and renaming Doc with Page.

Three major updates on Ubidesk – File revision, Online document editing, and renaming Doc with Page.

First of all, we are happy to announce that Ubidesk now supports file revisions as promised earlier.  You can browse all previous revisions of a file, delete unnecessary revisions, or revert a file to a previous revision.   It’s a very powerful feature as you can easily see the entire history of a file and have the power to roll back any unwanted changes.

Secondly, Ubidesk now incorporates Zoho online editor for Microsoft Word and Excel files and OpenOffice Writer and Calc files.  These popular office documents and spreadsheets are essential for most corporate users, and now you can edit them online in your web browser.  The online editing feature comes really handy when you access your Ubidesk workspace from a public computer that does not have Microsoft Office or OpenOffice installed.  Please note that the data transmission from/to Zoho online editor is not encrypted.  We will keep an eye on it to make it secure as soon as Zoho provides secure connections.

For those who prefer using Microsoft Office on a local machine no matter what, Ubidesk also supports ‘Direct Edit’ that allows users to edit uploaded MS Office files at the local machine and save the files directly back to Ubidesk workspace.

Last but not least, there has been an important renaming of a component of Ubidesk.  We used to separate online documents from files to distinguish those editable online from the rest type of files.  Since Ubidesk has expanded the online editing capability to the popular office files, it’s more straightforward to call online documents “Pages” as they are in fact HTML pages.  We hope this eliminates any confusion about documents and files in the past.  Those who are familiar with Wiki would feel more comfortable with the new naming approach.

Thank you all and wish you have wonderful holidays.

Team Ubidesk

Online Tech Tips: "Online business team collaboration software"

Aseem Kishore, an IT Systems Analyst and technology blogger, says  "Ubidesk has a very clean interface and a great set of features."

Ubidesk not only allows real-time collaboration among people across different continents, but it also includes all the tools necessary to manage documents, task lists, projects, group calendars, and notifications.

Here are the main features of Ubidesk and how they can help your small business or team manage projects efficiently. 

Document collaboration – One of the nice features of Ubidesk is the rich-text editor built into it. It supports many fonts, text formatting, image insertion, spell checking, and lots more. If you have multiple people working on the same documents, Ubidesk has an excellent tool to highlight which parts of the document were written or edited by which person based on a color coding system. It also includes a nice revision history and comparison feature whereby you can see all the older versions of a document and also compare older versions to new ones to see what the differences are. Finally, all documents also have full security meaning you can prevent some people from viewing a document and prevent others from editing it. You can also link documents to certain tasks that you create so that they are related to each other and everything is organized.  

Task Management – Unlike most task management programs out there where you simply add a task and then click a check box after it is finished, Ubidesk takes a new approach that mirrors reality more closely.First, a task must be assigned to someone, which makes sense. After it is assigned, the person clicks a button to “Start” the task. Then it moves into the “started” status and eventually moves to “complete” when it’s finished. Other cool features of the task manager module include a Task Log that tracks the complete history of the task, including who edited it, what was added or deleted, when the status was changed, etc. Lastly, there is a task timeline that basically turns your tasks into a Gnatt chart, which is very cool.

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Greetings to all Ubidesk users!

It has been a month since we released the first open beta of Ubidesk.

First of all, we thank all our users for their great support.  We are grateful to our users for participating in our beta and giving us thoughtful feedback. All your support will help us improve Ubidesk for sure.

During the first month, we were lucky to get great attentions from bloggers and press across the world.   Some of them found us even before our official beta release, which did surprise us in a good way.  We believe it shows the heat in online collaboration.  We appreciate all the reviews, blog posts, tweets, comments, diggs, and so on.  It was nice to see the responses from many different countries such as Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Sweden, the U.K. and more as well as the U.S.

Let us share what we have achieved.  Users from 115 countries created 1000+ Ubidesk workspaces during September only.  In addition, more than 40% of the visitors made multiple visits.  Surprisingly, no commercial push was made during the month to get the numbers.  Also, we have received many positive feedbacks from our users.  Some praised certain features of Ubidesk in detail while some summarized the praise in a short yet brilliant sentence such as "We love love love your site." or "It's so simple, yet effective."   While we appreciated all compliments equally, we were especially encouraged by the latter because that reflected the very basic philosophy of Ubidesk - Simple yet Effective.

We will continue to focus on collecting user feedbacks and improve Ubidesk based on them.  To do so, we need to expand our user pool by reaching out more diverse fields of industry.  We cordially invite all our users to join this mission.  Spread the words and let's build the best online collaboration workspace together!

Sincerely,

Team Ubidesk

More file formats are now supported for Preview!

Ubidesk file preview has been praised for its broad range of supported file formats. Now it gets even better. Ubidesk file preview now supports 38 file formats. Enjoy the file preview in your web browser instead of downloading each and every file to figure out what the file actually is.

Here is a list of supported files.

#Document file : doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, odt, odp, ods, swx, sxi, sxc, pdf, rtf, wpd, hwp, txt

#Image file : gif, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp, psd, tiff, dib, emf, ico, pcx, tga, ttf, wmf, svg, svgz

#Visio format : vsd, vdx

#AutoCAD format : dwf, dwfx

New Feature - Comment is available with Documents and Tasks.

Now you can leave a comment on almost everything in Ubidesk!

As of September 23, Ubidesk supports 'comment' on documents, tasks, and files. It's like you have an individual discussion board for each document, task or file. For a task, comments can be used to request a task progress report, to include any additional information regarding the task or simply to ask questions among the task participants. Similarly, documents and files can take advantage of comments by increasing the efficiency of communication among collaborators. Comments can be included in a search by checking the 'include comments' check box at the advanced search.

How about starting leaving comments on your favorite documents?

Thank you,

Ubidesk

Makeuseof.com: Ubidesk is a good way to go around online team collaboration – a solid web app with lots of potential and great attention to details.

Makeuseof.com calls Ubidesk "Fresh and comprehensive online teamcollaboration."

Launched just a couple of months ago, Ubidesk has already attracted the attention of the media and presents a solid feature list as well as a good user interface. Leveraging the SaaS (Software as a Service) concept, Ubidesk allows for team collaboration, be it in the same building or another continent, to instantly share and edit documents, upload files, manage both shared and private calendars, and manage tasks easily and efficient.

Ubidesk is definitely one of the most comprehensive solutions available at the moment. The online rich text editor has all the features you need to create complex documents, with formatting, images, tables, spell-checking and most essential – a solid revision tool that enables you to quickly spot changes made by other team members. If you’d rather not have your co-workers mess with your presentation, there is also a feature that locks new edits.

Since tasks and documents are almost always related to each other, you can assign documents to tasks and vice versa. Multiple documents can now be easily bundled for a task – no need to search a massive folder – and you’ve also got useful information such as the due date. Unlike other services, your tasks have different statuses: after a task is assigned, the status becomes “Started” when the assignee clicks the “Start” button. Nifty way to keep the project manager into the loop, isn’t it?

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