Many of us work with people located in different parts of the world and services like email, social networks and file sharing have offered us the ability to do so easily. Even here at AppStorm, Matthew Guay, the editor, and I live over 8,000 miles apart, but we are still able to communicate and work together productively thanks to our internet connections. There’s a range of project management and collaboration web apps around, but wouldn’t it be cool if teams could work in a shared workspace, virtually?
Enter Kohive, an online, virtual desktop for collaboration. Kohive mimics the design of a computer desktop to bring an online collaborative space for your team to work in.
Design & Interface
I’m going to kick off the review by looking at the design and interface of Kohive, because that’s what makes the app so unique and different in comparison to rival team/project management apps. Kohive is designed to look just like your computer desktop and is styled very much like one from a Mac OS X or Linux machine. This is a very nice design choice and gives Kohive a unique look and feel. The “apps” (that we’ll look at in more detail later) all run inside this desktop interface and can be dragged/moved about much like apps can on a native operating system like Mac OS X.
A Kohive virtual desktop
When you’ve signed up and logged in, you’re presented with your workspace. The dock on the left allows you to launch a number of apps to deal with different elements of your project management, including notes, bookmarks, etc. As I mentioned, these apps feel just like native apps on your desktop and can be moved about, arranged and collapsed, which is pretty cool, if nothing else.
On the bottom, you are also presented with a series of tabs which allow you to switch “hives” so you can seperate your workspaces. Each hive is a different desktop, and you can use a different one for a different cause, allowing you to participate in multiple projects simultaneously, but without the need for you to view them all aggregated together. For example, I could have a hive dedicated to AppStorm work and one dedicated to my personal life, swapping between the two with the tabs on the bottom.
If the default theme isn’t doing it for you, you can customise your desktop with a different wallpaper and a different colour for the bar at the top. This is achieved through the settings app. While these customisation options are very welcome, I’d like to see the ability to upload custom wallpapers to better brand (or beautify) your hive. Multiple themes, so the default OS X-style look could be modified, would be good too.
Kohive customisation
Inviting to the Hive
Of course, Kohive is a platform that’s not meant to be experienced solely. By inviting friends, family members or co-workers, you can use Kohive as an excellent platform for collaboration and communication. Each member has their own ID card which includes key profile information about each person.
Since you can have multiple hives, this allows Kohive to adapt to many different situations. You could use one hive to work with clients and one to communicate and share with family. Just as your clients and family might never meet in real life, they won’t be forced to do so virtually in Kohive.
The Apps
Kohive includes a range of virtual apps that will fit into your team’s workflow. There’s a messaging app which provides a basic platform for communication, as well as “Stickies”, an app for putting virtual sticky notes onto your shared desktop. These sticky notes look really great and are a fantastic way of bringing bulletins to the immediate attention of your team. Plus, just the action of dragging them out of the Stickies app and onto the desktop is just downright cool.
Stickies in Kohive
One of my favourite apps inside Kohive is the task manager, which allows teams to easily co-ordinate tasks. Tasks can be assigned to individual members of your hive, with different priorities, levels of effort and other metadata.
The other apps are chiefly concerned with files, allowing you to share documents, images and videos with your team, either by uploading them to Kohive or embedding them from services like YouTube and Flickr. Whereas services like Dropbox facilitate this kind of collaboration, Kohive does so in addition to everything else, providing a convenient, single destination for your team to work from.
Final Thoughts
Kohive’s functionality suits the desktop metaphor very well. The web app is very responsive and hasn’t ran me into any problems so far, so it seems very stable. If nothing else, Kohive is just cool because why wouldn’t an interactive, animated desktop in your browser be?
On a more serious note, Kohive provides a nice range of tools that makes it incredibly versatile and applicable to a wide range of projects. All the basics are there, from task management to file sharing, allowing you to have just one destination to send your team to. It’d be nice to see some deeper integration from third-party services, like Dropbox, but hopefully that’s in the roadmap.
Kohive is definitely worth checking out.