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Nextaris – Time and Task Management Tool
for IT Workers
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
March 9, 2005
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They say that time is money in the business world. As truisms go, the
statement is true enough. It was also once said that computers would be
time saving devices. The second statement, as any beleaguered IT worker
will tell you, is simply not true. Computers, as time saving devices,
continue to belong in the flying car category of science-fiction based
reality simply because time cannot be saved, it can only be managed. Even
though my colleagues and I labour under an executive team I consider to
be among the smartest managers in Canada, the whole firm is working longer
hours than ever before. My time is therefore not saved but it is very
well managed. The computer allows me to accomplish far more in a day than
my extremely talented Father could just one generation before me. At least
he had the luxury of punching-out at 5 every afternoon in his comfortably
hectic eight-hour per day, five-days a week world. Today, we live in an
expanding 24/7 universe with change flying as fast as the electrons we
push. To effectively manage time in a cyber-world that never sleeps, one
needs to rely on electronic assistants and tools.
Nextaris, the new content-management service from Menlo Park firm SurfWax is a toolbox for online publishers, content creators, design teams and developers.
According to the copy on its site, Nextaris is “an all- in-one set
of web-based tools for searching the Web, capturing content, saving/sharing
files, publishing blogs, messaging and networking.” The goal was to
create a dashboard application, one that subtly changes the way users relate
to searching and retaining content from the web. After establishing a free
account, Nextaris users are able to set up several types of public and/or
private files, the content of which is stored on the Nextaris server. The
filing system allows users to surf the web and save specific content such
as news-clippings, images, site copy, and source-code. Users can then sort
through their saved files to determine information to make public and which
to keep in secure folders for sharing with selected contacts or work-team
members. The toolbox is an online application that does not require users
download or install new files (though there is a clever drag-and-drop java
installation required).
Ease of use is important for SurfWax CEO Tom Holt. Believing that information
is best remembered and shared through contact groups or knowledge nodes,
Holt has some simple advice for new users. “Start with the photo albums.
Upload a few photos to share with family and friends.”
After experiencing how easy it is to use the application, Holt feels new
users will quickly appreciate the ability to save snippets of news-clippings
or entire site-copy containing information they'll need later or wish to
share with their contacts. As an example, StepForth will be using Nextaris
to publish an internal news and info update (sorry, staff only) two or three
times a week. The toolbox will allow us to store and archive what we consider
to be important SEO related information, and share that information with
each other without deluging ourselves with email-memos as we tend to do
now. Nextaris provides “sourcing” information automatically,
thus saving me the seconds required to enter the information manually. According
to Holt, the goal was to make a system where users could, “...save
specific snippets of content, a more efficient way to “bookmark” portions
of pages. Likewise Nextaris Images will show just images you've selected.” Another
feature is the Nextaris News Accumulator which works much like Google's
News Alerts but also saves a copy of the article for future reference.
The Nextaris system allows for the saving of images, site copy and source-code.
By enabling users to select groups of co-workers, family or friends to update
when new content is added to a file, Nextaris makes an excellent collaborative
and networking tool. A feature that will be easily appreciated by new-comers
to the web is that Nextaris does not require users to purchase storage space
as an ISP would. It allows users to establish accounts and publish for sharing
via the web without learning HTML or a more complicated CMS.
Perhaps the strongest feature of Nextaris is the one that binds the others
together in a publishing format, the Blog creator. Users of the Nextaris
system can easily create and upload content to a Blog-space. A setting allows
for news-clippings to be instantly added (and sourced to the original with
a back-link) to the user's Blog as well as being added to other shared or
private folders. With the growing popularity of Blogs seen in the corporate
world, the Nextaris system provides an easily adaptable environment to learn
and publish quality content from easily accessible files.
In their offices, the SurfWax staff has been using Nextaris for news and
collaborative file-sharing for the past few months with great success. For
search engine users, researchers, designers, developers and publishers,
Nextaris provides a number of one-click solutions to the problem of information
overload. This tool helps manage the only virtual resource a good programmer
can not create, time. As the mixed metaphor says, time is money and every
penny managed is a half-penny earned.
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