Ubidesk: Fresh & Comprehensive Online Team Collaboration

What makes the internet and technology in general very exciting, both from a consumer and journalist’s perspective, is the accelerated rate of innovation, or put more bluntly, of new stuff.

We’ve reviewed quite a lot of different tools that allow you to be more productive, organized and collaborative, such as Shareflow,Tokbox and Notely, but the search has not ended.  Today we’re going to take a look at Ubidesk, a fresh take on online team collaboration.

Launched just a couple of months ago, Ubidesk has already attracted the attention of the media and presents a solid feature list as well as a good user interface. Leveraging the SaaS (Software as a Service) concept, Ubidesk allows for team collaboration, be it in the same building or another continent, to instantly share and edit documents, upload files, manage both shared and private calendars, and manage tasks easily and efficient.

Ubidesk is definitely one of the most comprehensive solutions available at the moment. The online rich text editor has all the features you need to create complex documents, with formatting, images, tables, spell-checking and most essential – a solid revision tool that enables you to quickly spot changes made by other team members. If you’d rather not have your co-workers mess with your presentation, there is also a feature that locks new edits.

Since tasks and documents are almost always related to each other, you can assign documents to tasks and vice versa. Multiple documents can now be easily bundled for a task – no need to search a massive folder – and you’ve also got useful information such as the due date. Unlike other services, your tasks have different statuses: after a task is assigned, the status becomes “Started” when the assignee clicks the “Start” button. Nifty way to keep the project manager into the loop, isn’t it?

If you need more information about the development of a project or the status of your team collaboration, see who’s not doing their share or assign payment – the Timeline and the task log give a bird’s eye view of the changes. Are you working on the next generation MacBook hardware? Keep only the assigned project members in the loop by creating a hidden project. You’d like anyone to participate – make it public. Want others to see what’s going on, but not interfere, simply choose Protected.

With Ubidesk, you can manage  both your “Space” and personal calendar in one place. Keep your personal appointments private while sharing the work calendar with your colleagues – and see them all in one view, eliminating the possibility of overlapping appointments. Best of all, you can import and export at any time in the standard iCal format. Another aspect worth mentioning is the Sidebar. The Sidebar is a click away when you need to consult another document while writing or jot down notes in the Notepad.

There’s also no need to download files to your computer in order to view them – Ubidesk supports image and document formats such as JPEG, GIF, PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OpenOffice. “Direct Edit” eliminates the need to re-upload documents after editing them in Microsoft Office. We’ve also got a dedicated discussion space – with separate threads for each topic. Security conscious users will surely note the use of 256bit key encrypted HTTPS protocol to transfer data between your computer and Ubidesk. It’s good security, the same your bank uses. They also pledge not screen or filter any data.

Overall, Ubidesk  is a good way to go around online team collaboration – a solid web app with lots of potential and great attention to details. Sign up for free and share your impressions in the comments.