Kristofers Blog

CatalystOffice

I enjoy writing reviews and well honestly it’s kind of hard to come up with content for my blog from time to time, so a couple months ago I signed up with Sponsored Reviews and finally I got my first one which is what you see here…

This is a brief review of CatalystOffice a new web-base office suite, or specifically small business software, made to help small businesses mange their daily affairs better and to help employees keep in better contact with one another.

This suite was officially launched last week actually, right before Thanksgiving, you can learn more if you visit the Catalyst launch blog about all that.

Before we get into the review here’s a bit of info from the CatalystOffice website about the product:

- Its goal is to take away a lot of the frustrations small businesses have trying to get things done with Microsoft Outlook and Windows

- It works right through the web – you need a Firefox browser and a PC and there is no software to download

- It works with other Microsoft products – Word Excel PPT etc. – and you can import your Outlook contacts and calendar into CatalystOffice

- The software was designed for the needs of small businesses, with multiple users in different locations, and has a lot of “little” features that are missing from Microsoft Outlook and Windows

-There are 4 pricing plans starting at $25 per month – companies can add as many users as they want and the price does not increase, it’s only dependent on how much storage you use for your files (for example you get 10 Gigs of file storage for $25/month)

I like how it says you ‘need’ Firefox browser to use their software…

(All of the following thumbnails will open in new window to 1024×768 size where applicable.)

For this review I signed up for a free trial account on their website, they sent me my id and password to access the account and actually a special web address as well. Clicking the address took me to the login page, then through a series of pages to set up the basic account:

Once through you’re taken to the main Admin menu where you have numerous choices of things you can do related to CatalystOffice and all of the user accounts involved. Here you can set permissions for what users can do and many other options as well. At the bottom of the screen though is nine icons related to the various things you can do with CatalystOffice, from left to right they are: Admin-Messages-Documents-Calendar-Contacts-Tasks-Alerts-Notes-Journal, and here are screenshots of each:

From the Admin panel you can also check the stats for your server and the users logs as well.

Being this is brief I didn’t get into doing too much with CatalystOffice, but I did play with the email and the Documents feature to get an idea of how it all works. Setting up an email account is similar to using Outlook where you enter your information and your basically done, but when I tried to retrieve my messages it didn’t quite work.. but more on that later…

The next I did was try out a document and see what happens there. The idea here is that you can upload documents for all of your employees to use and access if need be and they open it with the software that is on their machine. So I uploaded a Word document and tried to open it, Java Opened and then I got an error, after I clicked through the error messages my software (OpenOffice) opened the document for me and I was ready to go.

So I continued playing with the Document part of CatalystOffice and I thought I would click the ‘Send’ button.. big mistake there, it opened the mail program in another window and it found all of my emails at the same time as well, opening about 40 pop-ups with briefs about the emails, then Firefox stepped in and blocked the other 942 pop-up email windows from opening..Thanks Firefox!

So after clearing that mess up I went back to the email and there were my messages! The email application is very similar to Outlook as well, but most email programs are really anymore.

Seeing all those emails there I decided I wanted to delete them, there I ran into my next small problem, another error telling me that no items were deleted due to system error. After I clicked ‘OK’ about 15 times my emails were all gone.. odd really it is..

So, what have we learned here?

Well I did play around with it a bit more and I found it to be a very interesting solution for a web/browser based suit of office tools. Obviously it’s not without its faults as we’ve seen, but I do believe that if they address these problems CatalystOffice could shape up to be a very useful product.

One thing I did notice was there was not any support for mobile devices, or I may have missed it, but you can IM through it to contact your employees etc.

Overall I think it’s useful solution for those businesses that need to keep in contact and have things readily available for their employees.

Now if they can just work out the bugs they’ll be alright!

And finally here’s a bit more about CatalystOffice:

CatalystOffice is an integrated suite of productivity software—email, document management, calendar, contacts, and instant messaging—created specifically to meet the needs of small businesses like yours.

Our applications are enterprise-grade. They’re the same tools big companies use, but they’re tailored for your small business—and far more affordable.

Our software is especially flexible. After all, people are more productive when they can work their way. With CatalystOffice, they can. We don’t tell you how to file your emails. And we don’t tell you how to share your documents. When it comes to organizing and managing your company’s information, you decide.

CatalystOffice was created by businesspeople, not IT folks. You’ll feel it in the intuitive functions. You’ll see it in the systems and controls. You say who has permission to read a document or change your appointments.

The best part is that all of this is quickly and easily delivered and managed over the web. Want to get a new hire hooked up with email? Snap. Done. That’s CatalystOffice.

What can we say about security? Redundant. Redundant. Redundant. Your data’s covered. And impressively located in the same data center as some of the best-known web companies in the world.

And you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to get started.

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