I downloaded and installed Enlista Classic on two of my machines: an iMac running Mac OS 10.3 (with 768MB RAM), and a Toshiba laptop running Windows 2000 Professional (with 384 MB RAM). Enlista is a peer-to-peer workgroup communications and collaboration product, designed for sharing information (primarily contacts, notes, and calendar entries) between multiple people.
By default, Enlista starts as a multi-paned Java window, with panes for folders (notes or calendars), contacts, items in the current folder, details of the current folder, and IM messages. Users can close individual panes, although they can not shift them to other parts of the screen.
Main observations:
After installation (a 2.3 MB download on the Mac, and 12.8 MB on the Toshiba), users sign up for an Enlista account. This includes a nickname, first and second names, email address, and password. It's the same idea as signing up for an AIM user name, or a Hotmail account.
Folders can store notes or calendar entries. Calendars can be stacked, hence enabling users to maintain a disparate set of calendar entries for business appointments, personal appointments, and birthdays, for example, and then viewing them together. A folder of calendar entries can be shared with a friend, and vice versa, enabling users to keep track of what others are up to. That's really nice. (Screenshot from Enlista)
The distinction between "Contacts" and "Friends" is silly. A contact is someone that I know about and track details of, and a friend is someone that I want to exchange real-time IMs with. A person can be both a contact and a friend, which potentially leads to double entry of information. There didn't appear to be a way of changing a contact into a friend, either. It would be much more sensible to have contacts only, and additional fields on the contact card that enables display in the friends section. When clicking the "Chat" button, both contacts and friends display in the list, although users can only chat with friends.
Sharing between people is done at the Folder level. Hence, when I create a folder within Enlista, I can assign sharing permissions to contacts or friends. Levels of permission include Full Control, Read Only, and Blocked. (Screenshot from Enlista) I shared a folder between the two user accounts I set up, and the changes to the note synchronized between the folders within seconds. However, there's no concept of co-editing of notes. If both users edit the same note simultaneously, one set of edits will be lost. That's bad.
Only text notes can be shared between users, not real documents, eg, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, AppleWorks, etc. That limits the usefulness of Enlista to content that can be created and maintained only within an Enlista folder.
While the peer-to-peer sharing is nice, folders, contacts and notes are machine dependent. Hence, if I log into Enlista from a second machine, I don't see content and details that I've created on the first machine. That's less than ideal.
Other observations:
Enlista didn't work quickly or well on the Toshiba laptop. Buttons were ghosted to parts of the screen they shouldn't have been. Refresh time was very slow. Dialog boxes took a long time to close. Hopefully that reflects badly on my Toshiba laptop, not Enlista.
IM transcripts can be saved as a .TXT file during or after the IM session. That's nice for keeping a record of what was discussed. However, it would be more ideal to be able to save the transcript as a note associated with a contact/friend record in Enlista. I guess users could copy and paste the transcript into a note in an Enlista folder, though.
Users can log into Enlista on more than one machine simultaneously.
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