If there's any trend evident in the collaboration world today, it's the movement away from complexity and toward simplicity. With so many products out there, many of them running simultaneously in a single organization, it's only natural to yearn for something that pares down the options.
That's part of the pitch Incentive delivered on Monday as part of its update that adds SharePoint integration, and it's also part of the case for Samepage, which got its own updates on Tuesday.
Samepage has a product to help consumers share content as well as one for business collaboration, and both got some key new features. Perhaps most notable on both sides is a long-awaited Android app to complement the existing iOS version.
Samepage also introduced an updated design that includes customizable "cover image" photo page headers, as well as social page-sharing via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
But probably the most exciting feature for business users is that Samepage now makes it easy to include content from cloud-based services such as Google Apps, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Box. So you can now tailor the service to incorporate all kinds of content, also including data from any Mac or PC application file.
Featuring 1 TB of storage, unlimited pages, user and team management and content-access controls, Samepage for Business is priced at $10 per user per month or $100 per user per year.
Samepage says it differentiates itself from other collaboration products by putting all the content featured on a page in context.
"What we realized is that all the tools out there mix up the content you're working on -- whether it's a meeting agenda or a product launch -- with the conversations surrounding them," said Scott Schreiman, Samepage founder and CEO. "As human beings, when we read through it all, we have to extract the meaning and the context from that."
That, in a nutshell, is what Samepage was designed to do. Toward that end, it presents content on one side of any given page -- including the text, the images and so on -- and the context, or the conversations, on the other.
"Where the magic happens is when you switch to your inbox in Samepage," Schreiman said.
Listed in that inbox are the pages you follow along with the updated conversations associated with them. Because of the way it's presented, he said, "you can triage your Samepage inbox in literally minutes in the morning."
