Seat at the Table

Walt Mossberg provides a good consumer review of Netvibes in today’s Wall Street Journal.  I would suggest also taking a look at this service as a basic but valuable collaborative business information tool. 

Probalby the most improtant feature is the ability to share tabs of information with specific team members.  This feature can act as a basic collaboration and coordination site that can be set up in only a few minutes.

Netvibes allows the user to share specific tabs with other users on a private basis.  This means someone on a client account team (or service line) can create a tab of relevant feeds, and share that tab with other members of the team.  We use this to make sure everyone is seeing the top information sources on a daily basis.  Each user can then open the Netvibes page and see a series of tabs for each client or project.

The same shared tabs can also contain a series of business tools for sharing information.  Some of our favorites modules are del.icio.us for sharing site links, Webnotes for leaving daily notes on news on the same page, box.net to share information and a calendar to note major events.

While there are many professional and more robust collaborative tools out there (we use various CMS systems, Sharepoint, Quickbase and others), Netvibes is a fast, easy and user friendly tool that keeps everyone on the same news page…literally.