Onfolio
Onfolio
 By
Dale Farris, Vice-PresidentGolden Triangle PC Club June 2004 General Overview Online research can be time consuming, but finding the information is only the first step. Collecting and managing the information for future use in a focused, structured, and organized manner is as important as finding the information in the first place, and is essential for maximizing the effectiveness of online research. Onfolio is a PC application for collecting, organizing, and sharing information you find on the Internet. You can use Onfolio to easily capture and annotate links, pages, snippets of text, images, and documents from the Internet. Onfolio seamlessly integrates with your browsing experience, and includes powerful tools for sharing your research through email, reports, documents, and websites. Anyone who uses the Internet to gather information, research topics, organize activities, shop, or study will find Onfolio an essential application. Onfolio is great for everyone, from Internet users at home to information professionals who do research for their job. With its supreme ease of use and its focus on solidifying the research process based on Internet access, Onfolio belongs in the homes of all writers, researchers, teachers, and students, and is also an excellent tool all libraries should seriously consider adding to their library workstations. University libraries most especially will want to consider adding the program to all their workstations. Onfolio is available in two editions, including the Standard Edition and the Professional Edition. Onfolio Features Collect as you Browse Onfolio makes it easy to collect information from the Web and store it on your computer, conveniently organized into research collections. Comprehensive Internet Capture - Capture hyperlinks, Web pages, individual images, PDF documents, Microsoft Office documents, text snippets and files. Single-Click Capture - With a single click from the Onfolio IE toolbar in your browser shortcut, you can quickly capture the content you want from any site you're browsing. Commenting - Add comments to the items that you capture to record why you captured it and summarize the content. Priority Flags - Flag key items with any one of five colored priority flags to remind yourself to come back to them later or to note the top priority items. Personal Notes - Write your own research notes and save them in your Onfolio collection along with your captured content. Information Autocapture - When it's available, key data about the content that you capture is automatically saved including source URL, copyright, author, keywords and capture date. Search Memory - Automatically save the search that you used to find the content, so you can easily recreate searches. Anywhere Capture - Move content from any application or the file system into an Onfolio collection by copying and pasting items to Onfolio. Organize your Research With Onfolio, the information you collect will always be readily available with intuitive tools for organizing, viewing and searching research collections. Multiple Research Collections - Your captured content is stored in a collection that is a single file on your local machine. You can create multiple collections and any number of folders and nested folders within collections. Convenient Collection Browsing - Easily browse the items you've captured in the Collection Explorer, which lets you quickly move between folders and sort items. Fast Content Searching - Quickly search large collections with a full text search engine that makes it easy to find anything you've captured. Comment Previewing - Preview comments you've written in the item list in the Collection Explorer so you can easily remember what's in the items you've captured. Item Viewing - View captured items in your browser with a single click. In-Place Item Editing - Open captured items and edit them in their respective desktop applications such as Microsoft Word for documents and the Onfolio Snippet Editor for HTML snippets. Item Annotation - Annotate items with comments, priority flags and custom fields that you can specify. Share What you Learn Onfolio lets you flexibly share the information you have collected using everything from documents and presentations to emails and blogs to research reports and Websites. Report Publishing* - Quickly and easily share the information that you capture by authoring MHT documents with Onfolio Publisher. MHT documents are Websites in a single file. They can easily embed items, and they can be viewed in IE. Website Publish* - Publish your research in a Website, with selected links, comments and content that you've captured. Automatically, include an RSS feed as part of the output. Email - Generate email messages with links and comments to send people selected information that you've captured. Microsoft Office Integration - Access your collections and easily copy items into any Microsoft Office document in Word, Excel or PowerPoint through the Onfolio Deskbar. Collection Sharing - Since your Onfolio collections are a single file, you can easily share whole collections or folders within collections by sending them to other Onfolio users. Drag-to-Desktop - If you want to convert the information you have in an Onfolio collection into individual files on the desktop, you can simply drag a folder or item from the Collection Explorer right to your desktop. * Feature included in Professional Edition of Onfolio Other Features Toolbar and Capture Dialog - The Onfolio IE toolbar and Capture Dialog are conveniently integrated with your browsing experience, so capturing content takes just a single click of a button. Collection Explorer - The Collection Explorer lets you easily access, organize, and search all the information you gather right from within your browser. Collection Explorer - Split Pane In the split pane view, you can easily work with very large collections of information. Property Tray - The property tray makes it easy to view, edit, and update the information collected about your items, including author, copyright, search, and custom fields. Deskbar - Access your research from applications other than Microsoft IE using the Onfolio Deskbar. Publisher - Create professional reports, publish websites, and generate RSS feeds quickly and easily with the powerful tools in Onfolio Publisher. What is the Difference Between Onfolio Standard and Professional? In the current release of Onfolio, the Professional edition includes Onfolio Publisher. Onfolio Publisher is a powerful tool for authoring reports and websites, as well as generating RSS feeds with the research that you have collected. The Professional edition also lets you customize the template that you use for quick reports, and use your own template for reports. What Browsers Does Onfolio Work With? Currently, Onfolio only works natively with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. However, you can use it with other browsers (like Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera) by using the Onfolio Deskbar, which can be accessed through the Onfolio program group in the Windows Start menu. What is the Microsoft .NET Framework? The Microsoft .NET Framework is the new standard for building applications for Microsoft Windows. All new versions of the Windows Operating system will include the Microsoft .NET Framework, and it is included as part of Office 2003. If you do not have the framework installed, the Onfolio installer will download and install it. Onfolio decided to build the program with the .NET Framework so Onfolio would be on the leading edge of Windows application development. This means that your investment in using Onfolio can easily carry forward to future versions of Windows. Benefits From Using Onfolio Onfolio works as an add-on to Microsoft Internet Explorer (5.5 or later required), adding a toolbar to IE's interface. When Onfolio is active, it displays an Explorer Bar to the left of the browser window, similar to IE's History and Favorites bars. Here you create collections, which are hierarchies of folders where you store data you gather from the Web. To add items, you simply click the Capture button on the main Onfolio toolbar, or just use the F9 shortcut key. You can capture an entire page, or you can highlight and save only an important snippet of a page. The content (text and graphics) can be stored locally so you can access the data off-line, or you can store just a link to the page. You can also annotate items and add priority flags. The end result is a very robust way to collect data. If you want to share your data with others, you will need the Professional Edition of Onfolio. To create a report, just open the Publisher pane, drag in items from various folders, and arrange the content on a page. You can add your own text to the report and dress it up by formatting the text and inserting graphics. In order to alter the report style definitions, you have to edit a separate cascading style sheet file outside of the program. Target Customers Onfolio is one of the most inspired new software applications you will likely come across, and it is a certainty for folks who find themselves regularly using the Internet for their necessary information. Onfolio is tailor-made for anyone involved in using the Internet for research. This includes teachers and students, as well as writers and other professionals who need background information on their subject of concern. Onfolio provides you a way to efficiently clip out the salient parts of online research and place these parts into structured folders, then share those folders with colleagues. Onfolio lets you pull out the key information from each source and set it up in manageable excerpts that are easy to catalog and sort through, and that are automatically referenced. Onfolio is essential for gathering online sources, and allows you to quickly select the information you need and intuitively file it for easy retrieval. In the academic world the ability to professionally save and manage information for future use is essential, and Onfolio does that very effectively. You can use it to collect and organize patents and technical information collected from multiple sites, and unify it for your customer in one professionally structured report. Professionals in departments as diverse as marketing, customer support, or business development spend more and more time conducting online research. Whether it is an extensive in-depth analysis of market segments, consumer trends, competition, patents, or just a stock quote or ticker symbols, a focused answer requires the aggregation of selective snippets of content from multiple sources and formats. Finding the information is therefore only half the battle. With the lack of effective post-processing solutions business users either give up on organizing and sharing their research findings altogether, or spend the same amount of time it took to find the information in post-processing it. In both cases, users report loss of information, duplicated research efforts and ineffective sharing and collaboration. Onfolio addresses these challenges with a flexible solution that delivers immediate benefits to enterprise researchers. Since many projects in enterprises require gathering data from online sources, users will appreciate replacing the ineffective email exchange with one central platform to which they can instantly drag refined snippets of information that pertain to their project. Provide your users with professional reporting capabilities that generate maximum impact and perceived value. Decision makers appreciate receiving concise, already annotated and well-structured reports delivering a focused answer rather than lengthy documents. Price $29.95 Onfolio Standard |