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Getting Wiggio With It
10/19/2010
| COSEE ENTs,
(COSEE.net)
Tags: groups, ENTs, online, tools
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What is Wiggio? It's an online tool for collaborative work, and it's free and easy to use. I currently have five active Wiggio groups. (Note that one Wiggio account can create multiple groups, which can be viewed separately or combined, in the calendar, for example): It's great for the kind of projects COSEE Centers often develop, that have a geographically dispersed collaborative approach. Wiggio gives your group a place to put everything - post messages (which can be received as an email), files, documents, videos, photos, PowerPoint presentations, etc.
Groups I am part of have used Wiggio for previewing a presentation, posting a blog, looking at a spreadsheet, scheduling meetings, sending messages. It takes the place of having to use multiple separate tools, such as listservs, Doodle polls, calendars and Google docs. Following is some more detailed description:
Wiggio came out of beta in February 2009 with a new look and features such as a Twitter-like message stream for group members, a group listserv, a shared calendar, mass text and voice messaging, file-sharing (including online docs and spreadsheets), polling, and more. According to the company, Wiggio currently has over 500,000 users.
Wiggio's interface includes six basic toolsets
Calendar — A fairly simple shared calendar that allows you to manage group events. There's no easy way to add this calendar to whatever time management system you use, but you can set up an automatic email whenever a change is made to the calendar (or any other part of your group). Gmail can translate those emails into Google Calendar events without an issue. You can also export this calendar to Outlook, Yahoo! or iCal calendars.
Folder — You can upload most file types to Wiggio groups. You can edit documents and spreadsheets within Wiggio and get version-tracking automatically. A group member can download the file, change it and re-upload it. He/she doesn't need to change the file name or anything for Wiggio to recognize it as a new version. Old versions are still available. You can view photos and videos, and listen to audio files from within the Folder.
Meeting — Wiggio offers three types of meetings for users: in-person, conference call and chat rooms. For conference calls, Wiggio uses Rondee, a free conference call service. Wiggio will also host chats for a group.
Poll — Wiggio's poll allows you to get a quick consensus of your groups members. You ask questions, and get the responses back aggregated in a chart format
Messages — Through Wiggio, you can send and receive messages in three different ways: text message, email and voice note. Each group has its own email address. When anyone in the group mails in to that address, it gets redistributed to everyone in the group, according to their delivery preference. Emails from non-group members are blocked to eliminate spam. Subgroups support communication with a subset of the group without having to choose all their names.
To-Do - This feature allows you to create To-Do lists for your group. Group members can check events as done when they complete them and Wiggio will tell everybody who checked them off.
--contributed by Catherine Cramer
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