Evectors Pages Beta Launch: Innovative Collaborative Working

I caught up recently with Paolo Valdemarin, CEO of Evectors - a web consultancy for large enterprises - about one of their latest betas, Pages. As a quick backgrounder, Evectors developed K-Collector in 2003, a knowledge management platform for blogs which counted the BBC as a first client for the trial. The Evectors team is now developing tools and applications while consulting, using one activity to bolster the other. This has enabled them to concentrate on further product developments.

One of their current clients is Nova, and Evectors is working on the popular Nova100 project for the Italian publisher. Nova100 is an initiative to distribute blog content to influencers including politicians, business leaders and the entertainment industry. Luca De Biase heads up the project, selecting high profile and well known figures to blog on a wide range of topics of interest to a wider audience. Evectors developed the technology that runs behind the Nova100 platform.

After working with Nova100, the Evectors team realised there was an issue surrounding document creation for collaborative working, where simple wikis did not suffice. So they created Pages - a system of creating and managing documents (or “pages”), for collaborative working. It has now been expanded into a very nice tool which is currently in private beta testing.

I’ve been testing out Pages recently and it’s a great way to collaborate on a project. The functionality is intuitive and it’s very easy to create and edit pages. Once you create your page, you are able to add modules including images from a Flick account, video from YouTube, MySpace etc and also text based modules in the style of a blog post.

The text module:

The Flickr module:

There is also a handy feature that logs all the activity on a page in order of time, so users can see who has modified or added to the document and when.

I caught up with Paolo recently, and he highlighted some of the advantages of Pages; “All the editing and html generation is done on the browser rather than sending information to a server and the html is generated within the client, making the load on the server very low - all it does is assemble the posts. This is great for scalability as all the work is done client side when the author creates the post.” Paolo also hinted that they will be opening their API so that developers will be able to create plug ins and apps for Pages.

There are currently versions in English and Italian and the technology is first being offered to Nova as part of the blog project. Evectors is based in Gorizia and the Pages project is auto-financed.

There are a few private beta invites available so if you are interested in taking a look, please let me know.