Hello and welcome to another episode of WebInformant.TV. I’m your host, David Strom. Today we’re looking at a new email and web collaboration service from Open Exchange and you can see the main inbox and summary screen here. OX is more than just another email service because of the way it allows you to import and export your information in new and innovative ways. If you use a bunch of different services such as LinkedIn, FaceBook and Google’s Gmail, you probably are washed in a sea of contacts. The bad news is that once you’ve been using these services for a while, there isn’t an easy way to update contact information across the board, and while there are privacy settings in each service, they’re hard to apply across all of your contacts consistently.
There are few products that can do this now including myOtherDrive.com and Plaxo’s Pulse but these only create yet another propriety web service that you’re locked into using and can’t easily extract your data if you don’t want to use the service any longer. This is where Open Exchange’s social OX feature comes into play. You can import data aggregate specific pieces of it for particular purposes and publish it to the internet.
Let’s take a look at my ‘Contacts’ page. If we right click on the listing on the Menu tree, we go on to a Property sheet and click on subscriptions and we can add new ones. You can see a different series of sources for our contacts that are supported here. We just have to authenticate ourselves for the appropriate service and OX will proceed to do the imports.
As you can see here, it can also export it out as a comma separated file with just a few mouse clicks. You can even publish the subset of your contacts to a website here. You have control over your data and keep control over it regardless of where it originates. When you’re done sharing this information, you can click on the ‘Remove’ key and the shared page goes away.
There’s a similar sequence for importing your calendar items. If we go on to configuration import, we can get calendars that have been saved in iCal format such as Gmail’s calendar, or bring in contacts from our Desktop. As you can see, OX has the beginnings of some powerful collaboration tools for work groups that give you control over how much you can share.
Another example is how you can synchronize your messages, contacts and calendar items with various mobile phones, such as the i-phone screen shown here. As we can see, OX also includes a shared work group file repository called its ‘Info Store’. This is similar to numerous other web services. The distinguishing different is that this, like the rest of OX, is entirely open source based and also can be published and shared on the internet. OX is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook so that users can use the OX back end services with similar functionality to exchange, to share contacts and folders even when offline.
Where can you get OX? There are number of hosting partner providers that white label its service as you can see in this screen, including Network Solutions and One-on-one in the United States. Either of which will sell you a mailbox for five dollars a month. There are other ways to obtain this software, including running it on your own Linux servers as well.
What are the things I didn’t like about OX? The user controls are a bit inconsistent and it took some hunting around to figure things out. They are obviously just getting started with social OX and not all the services are yet supported. The imports are somewhat slow. If you have several hundred of thousands of contacts like I do, it might take several days to do the imports. So be nice to know when they’re complete and also an overall tally of how many contacts have been imported successfully.
Finally, this service is still somewhat Euro-centric as you can tell from the previous pricing page of the providers that mention value added taxes in Euros. Still these are small points and OX is a great idea that is worth further exploration. You can sign up for a free trial on the OX.IO website and move up to a paid version.
Thanks for watching another episode of WebInformatnt.TV. If you want me to come speak at your next conference or event, watch more of my video reviews or subscribe to my weekly free newsletter on other IT topics. Check out the links on this slide or go to Strom.com.
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