Live Evaluation of Netvibes
As an experiment, I decided to adopt Netvibes to understand how it could benefit me at work and what features are sorely missing in order to qualify as an Enterprise application.
I created a ‘General’ tab, containing a ‘To-do’ widget to help me track task – so far, it is still blank as I have yet to transfer tasks from the Outlook application over. I am still mulling if this is a good idea since in Outlook I get automated reminders for due tasks. Next, I have a Facebook widget – This is useful to view my friend’s status and surprisingly the widget works as I have no way of connecting directly as my company firewall blocks Facebook. I also added a multi-timezone widget – This is extremely useful as I need to plan meetings with global colleagues. I have a Flickr widget showing my family photos – this allows me to view new photos uploaded by my wife of our kids. I added a ‘Web Search’ widget which searches Google, Yahoo and others but I haven’t used it yet as I am happy with the Google Search bar on my firefox. Finally, I have the gmail and MSN mail widget to view new emails in my Inboxes. Unfortunately, Yahoo mail is not a free feature for non-POP accounts, otherwise, it would be complete for me in this general section.
Next tab, I have Meebo application as my company does not allow installation of external IM.
Next tab, I have reserved for all the blogs that I subscribed to. Netvibes has a cool feature that displays the # of unread articles on the tabs so you never need to navigate to the tab in order to check if there are new feeds coming in – a good time-saving for me.
Next tab, I have added a bookmarket widget and I added some bookmarks to it from my Netvouz account (which again was block by my company firewall). I didn’t find this bookmark application user-friendly enough hence my slowness in migrating my bookmarks even though it has a ‘tag’ feature.
Next tab, I have multiple ‘Weather’ widgets set up based on countries that I will be travelling to this year – useful to know what clothes to bring and what to wear.
Next tab, I have configured my gmail calendar to be displayed on this tab though I havent really found a good use for it as I have always relied on my Outlook calendar for most of my activities (both work and personal). I would love to have this tab display when and where my travel plans are and if anyone in my social network will be in the same location. If someone has a good suggestion on how to replicated my Outlook and GCalendar, please drop me a comment.
Last tab, I added a ‘Jobs’ tab for all the popular jobsites in Singapore to track jobs searching a specific criteria (obviously, my types). Even if I am not on the lookout, it gives me a feel of the market trend and the economy at the moment.
Overall, after setting up and using Netvibes for a few days, I do positively feel that it has improve my productivity, allowing me to do more in less time.
Drop me a comment if you have other ideas to use Netvibes for work.
