When it launched a few months back, online collaboration suite Flowr was touted as something of a white-label, private Facebook for enterprise companies. It’s really more like the Facebook News Feed on steroids, and with a freemium pricing structure, it’s an ideal solution for businesses large and small alike.
In some ways, it’s more akin to the now-defunct Google Wave, in the sense that it offers a vertically-flowing interface for real-time communication and collaboration.
Upon logging into Flowr, each team member is shown the company’s “flow”, which is a stream of the latest updates, ideas and action items. Think Facebook News Feed, but without your weirdest relatives.
Above that is an editable text box with a “Share” button to the right of it. From here, users can share one of six types of items: Status, Ideas, Questions, Pages, Events, To-Do Lists and Polls. Each one can have files, links or tags attached to it, and can be shared with everyone, certain groups or just oneself.
Once posted, an item can be liked Facebook-style and acted upon according to what type of post it is. For example, polls can be taken right from the company flow, and ideas can voted on once by each team member, not unlike Digg.
What makes Flowr especially powerful is its seamless integration with other products and platforms. While most of the magic happens in the Web application, it goes well beyond the browser. Team members can email posts to [email protected] or access the platform from its iPhone app. Its RESTful API allows for integrations with third party products, including Google Apps. Flowr also has detailed analytics on platform usage and a browser bookmarklet for quickly sharing Web content with team members.
Small and medium-sized businesses can sign up for Flowr for free and still get most of the core features, 2 groups, 1 GB of storage, and SSL security.
