Hall.com Opens The War Room For Full Team Collaboration

Hall.com publicly launched its real-time collaboration platform in November of last year and in less than four months has taken it to the next level with War Room. The core functionality, which we wrote about last year, is still active and being used, but is now called "Community Rooms" instead of a "Hall". Other enhancements such as the new top navigation bar and a persistent information panel on the right now adorn the site. They still need to add a search function to find public communities.

Let's see what the War Room can do!

Each of the numbered items below correspond to a red number on the large screenshot underneath. You can click on the image to enlarge it or right click and open it in a new tab so that you can flip back and forth.

1. Group Chat - Each person in the War Room can type and everyone can see the messages. To direct, but not hide, a message to a single person you can @mention them.
2. File Sharing - Files may be uploaded traditionally or by drag and drop for everyone to access. This is only a way to easily share files with a group for review; they can not be edited or viewed within the browser.
3. Notepad - This virtual piece of paper can be used for anything. All edits are visible as they occur by anyone and everyone can edit and create content live at the same time.
4. Invite - Here you are able to invite people to your War Room by email, Facebook post, or by sharing a specific URL. Each member needs to have an account to enter and can sign up traditionally or with Facebook.
5. Members - This section shows the current members and has a green icon in the lower right corner of each avatar to show if the person is activity logged in to the room.
6. Video Stream - Up to four members can broadcast video and audio for a video conference. Other people in the room can still see and hear the group even if they are not able to participate.
7. Private Chat - You and your contacts (#10) can IM privately without the War Room seeing.
8. Actions - The monitor/administrator can edit the room name and privacy, make other members monitors or kick them out, and change the email notifications. An email may be sent for each action, a daily summary, or no email at all.
9. Activity - A list of recent activity in the Community and War Rooms you participate in.
10. Contacts - Your contacts (requires mutual approval)
11. My Hall - Lists of your rooms

This is a great step forward in getting everything you need in one place for everything from ordinary meetings to project collaborations by virtual companies. Hall.com can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and their blog.

Hall.com Is Your Answer To Simple Real-Time Collaboration

Hall.com is a dead simple real-time collaboration tool by CompanyLine. This online tool is perfect for personal and business use. Brett Hellman started the company after creating a similar app to fill a void while working in corporate America. Once he did that he saw the potential and set out on his own.

It only takes a few minutes exploring the website to get the lay of the land before you are off and running. To test it from both sides (admin and user) I used an incognito window on Chrome to see the full functionality. Once you setup an account you can begin by joining some other halls (Apple, Startup, ESPN, Ruby, etc.) or creating your own. A hall is like an auditorium, or room, where people congregate, have events, and talk. Within the hall you can have a conversation and interact using four different apps, or widgets. You become the "hall monitor" when you create your own hall and can also designate other members to be monitors.

Poll - The monitor can create the name of the poll and the options to select. The system allows each user to select one option, or even create their own option to vote for. The % of each option chosen is shown as well as a interactive pie chart. Each vote is registered in real-time.

Ranker - After being set-up this interesting app provides a list to each user which they drag and drop in order of importance. The system aggregates all the completed lists to provide the average view of the voters. The way it does this is by (if you have three items in the list) giving three point to the first item, two to the second, and one to the third. The points are tallied up, and the entry with the highest points is the number one chosen entry. Unlike all the other apps, users are not able to add an entry to interact with.

To-Dos - This is a simple list of items that can be ticked off. Everyone can add to the list as well as complete items on it. If something gets check off in error, or is found by another user to have not been completed, it can be unchecked. All action happens live and everyone viewing the app at that time can see the things being completed in real-time.

Notepad - This freeform virtual piece of paper can be used for anything. All edits are visible as they occur by anyone and everyone can edit and create content live at the same time.

As soon as you try it out you will immediately start to think of use cases. The possibilities are endless even though the website is still very much a work in progress. I can see using this while on a conference call, especially because the monitor/admin can provide the hall link to anyone and no sign-up is required to join in. The hall can be protected by password for security. They are continually enhancing and launching new features. Some of the things I would like to see are:

• Add information on the activity tab to see what app the activity was for
• For the notepad app, have a track changes feature to know when things were added or edited, and by who
• Have profiles so that people can click on avatars and names to get more information about a user
• Allow a hall monitor to delete conversation entries
• Create a search function to look for halls
• Encrypted connection for password protected halls

I was impressed with the simplicity of the design and look forward to seeing how Hall.com progresses. Live collaboration can be very complex and keeping it simple is the key to success. Follow and interact with them on their blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

Scrumblr - An Online Planning Tool With Potential

Scrumblr is a web-based version of a Scrum agile sprint board that supports real-time collaboration. It is very simple and fun to use with a lot of potential. I would like to see password protection added for the boards with an option to save the board as a image file. User accounts and additional features would make this a full fledged online collaboration tool. It is built using NodeJS, WebSocket (using Socket.IO), CSS3, and jQuery and the source code is available for free under GNU General Public License. One of the features that took me a few times using to find is to click on "unknown" (bottom right) and type your name. When each person accessing the board through the provided link does this you can see who is on it, and if they don't, you can see someone unknown is viewing.

Screenshot of Scrumblr