Zaplet Messages: E-mail based collaboration Tool

THOUGH E-MAIL is the most popular communication medium these days, it lacks the necessary features that help us conduct any collaborative tasks. This week we will take a look at a service, which attempts to build a collaboration tool that lets us send e- mails embedded with a small application (appmail) designed to achieve a specific collaborative task.

Zaplet message

Suppose you and your friends are in the process of formulating a project proposal. You note down your ideas, send it across to other members of the team through e-mail. They in-turn send their reply with necessary modifications - the process goes on like this till the proposal takes a proper shape. Though this process is effective, it is quite difficult to keep track of an e-mail discussion of this kind, as the normal e-mail technology does not have the required tools to properly structure/conduct a discussion based on it. After a few e-mails, you will most probably start missing the old threads. The application zaplet is an attempt to take the e-mail technology further so that it facilitates this kind of collaborative work. Here the message to the group members is sent along with a link to an application designed to perform certain tasks that achieve the collaborative task in hand. In the example described above, we can create a zaplet message and send it to all the team members. When a recipient opens this zaplet message, he/she gets a link to the web page where the latest information regarding the discussion is stored. At this point, he/she may add/edit the contents, which then get automatically updated/stored in the server and it will be communicated to others.

If you want to get a feel of the product, visit the site at: http://www.zaplet.com, access the 'Try IT ' option and register with the service. When you log-in to the site, you will be taken to your zaplet page where you can see shortcuts to many readymade applications that can be considered as zaplet building blocks.

Now we will see how we can create and send a zaplet to conduct a poll that seeks the opinion of a few respondents on a product. Start by clicking at the application 'Poll'; the service will present you a Window where you can enter the details regarding the poll objectives. After filling up the input boxes, click at the 'Address and Sent' option. At this point the zaplet will take you to the next screen; now, enter e-mail addresses of the persons whom you want to participate in the survey and click at the 'Send Now' button. When this e-mail (appmail) reaches the mailbox of the recipients, it will have the necessary instructions for the recipient to participate in the survey. , By clicking at the link provided by the mail, the recipient can get into the web page containing all the survey related information such as the survey sheet, option to view other survey participants . Since rest of the part is quite simple we will not go further into this. This is just one of the numerous ways you can deploy the zaplet technology. The service hosts many model application building blocks such as File Sharing, File approval, Recruitment manager etc and depending on your requirements you can create different kinds of zaplet messages.

MetaPad

Most users of Windows users must be familiar with the text editor software Notepad that comes along with the Windows. Though Notepad is a good editor, its features are limited -like its inability to handle large sized files. If you are looking for a good replacement for the Notepad, here is a free feature-rich text editor- MetaPad, available at: http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad - which can handle large files; has the ability to retrieve recently edited files . A notable feature of this product is its ability to save in the UNIX text file format. If you have a web site hosted in a remote server, generally you will be editing the web page related files through a Windows editor (like Notepad) and if your web server is UNIX-based you will most probably land up in trouble if you upload the files without properly converting them into a UNIX format. So this product should be useful for Web masters who work with the Windows and have their web sites hosted in a UNIX-based server. If you want more details on the product such as how to make Metapad as the default editor, look at the FAQ available at http:// www.liquidninja.com/ metapad/ faq.html

GetSmart

If the Net programmers had not invented the download managers, downloading files would have become an almost impossible task- especially for a dial-up Net user. This column has already featured many download managers that quite efficiently handle the task. Among the products featured so far DLExpert (http://www.yanew.com) continues to be this author's favourite. In this regard, we will have a look at another download manager that also contains all the features available in popular programs of this kind-like resuming the downloading process after disconnection, splitting the target file into multiple components and downloading all the components simultaneously. But what makes this program a little different from other similar products is its ability to act as a proxy server to applications that can be configured to use proxies -like our web browser. This means that while downloading a web page, we can configure our browser in such a way that the browser, instead of directly trying to download a web page from the web server, will attempt to get it through 'GetSmart', which will use its split feature and thereby increases the speed. According to the GetSmart's site, this feature can be employed to speed up special downloads like IE package, Norton live updates.

A trial version of the software can be downloaded from the site: http://getsmart.hypermart.net/

J.Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

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