Cyn.in (pronounce sign in) is a webbased service for collaboration and communication. Cyn.in calls itself a ‘bliki’, a combination between a blog and a wiki. The great thing about Cyn.in is that you can publish information in four different zones: the web space, the intranet space, shared notes, and personal notes. The web space you can use for communicating information outside the organisation, like a blog. The intranet space you can use for communicating within the organsiation. The shared notes can, for example, be used to share information between project groups. The personal notes can be used as a means to store your own information and when it is ready to share you can move it to another space.
Adding a new note is fairly easy. Just click “New note” and start editing the content. Of course a WYSIWYG editor is used for the editing. The editor has all the features you need to create rich articles.It is easy to embed media and to perform a spellcheck. This is all very basic, but it works very well. Next you can attach documents to the note including version management. To structure the notes you created it is possible to add “slashtags”. When for example you add the slashtag “/Home” and the note will be placed in the category Home. To share the note with other users in your bliki you click on share and select other users in your bliki or you can invite a new user. When you choose to publish the note select the publish to intranet or publish to the web.
The layout of the pages in Cyn.in look very good. Especially below the notes a very comprehensive overview of actions is displayed. The actions include details of the note, posting a comment, editing the note, adding slashtags, sharing the note, publishing the note, and an overview of the previous versions of the note.
I think that the strength of Cyn.in is that it is very simple to switch the notes between the different spaces. This can be perfect for project groups. These groups have information that will be perfect to share in this bliki. The information that a poject group has can be divided into the same spaces Cyn.in uses: personal, shared, intranet and web spaces. A user can work on their personal information and keep this information private. When this user has to perform a task with a collegue they can share their information. To communicate information within your company about your project you can publish the information on the intranet space. When you want to communicate information to the outside world you can publish the information on the web space. The reader will see this posting as a blog. This is perfect. You don’t need different systems to perform all these actions.
The costs range from 30 dollars per user per month for small groups to 20 dollars per user per month for 500+ users. I think this pricing model is good for project groups, but too expensive for large groups.
Pros:
- Easy to use
- nice dashboard
- all actions are easy to perform
- switch notes between spaces
- RSS feeds of different sources
- fileupload with versioning
Cons:
- I miss a good overview of all notes in the dashboard
- Expensive for large amounts of users
- no real tagging, only slashtags
