Lunarr

Posted on September 25, 2007
Filed Under Companies, web 2.0 |

I met Lunarr’s founders Toru Takasuka and Hideshi Hamaguchi a few weeks ago and said I would write something about their new service when it launched last week. As is often the case I was sidetracked on some other business so I didn’t get a chance to write, but I did want to follow up because I think what they are doing is really compelling.

First a disclosure, I don’t often collaborate with other people around documents, I usually work alone so when it comes to collaboration systems I am ill-equipped to provide much more than what I think is a good approach.

Lunarr’s concept is deceptively simple, embed messaging with document editing to achieve a fully integrated approach. It’s actually pretty clever, every document has an arrow that you can click to flip it over to the back page where threaded messaging around that document takes place.

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There are a couple of other things that I found interesting, the first being the minimalist approach to the layout and the second is that the editing toolbar is located at the bottom of the browser as opposed to the top. Quite honestly, this takes a little getting used to but it’s a great idea because when you scroll the page down the top bar scrolls off the page giving you better utilization of the screen real estate while retaining the all important editing toolbar at the bottom. Neat.

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Lunarr also features a solid versioning system that you can use to rollback edits to a previous version. This is an essential feature for any group collaboration system.

I can actually see myself using this on a regular basis but there are a couple of things on my wish list. First and foremost, integration with my existing messaging systems (either gmail or the Exchange server I also use) is a must if for no other reason than I don’t need another email system to think about. Secondly, this is begging for a @your.domain premium service along with branding options for companies.

As is always going to be the case for companies breaking into the office productivity market, richer editing tools are on the wish list as well, but I will say that I found the included tools in this release to be more than adequate for most of my needs. I think a spreadsheet capability would be most welcome as well.

Lastly, I want to draw your attention to one other feature that I think could be the sleeper feature in this app, the ability to import a fully intact web page and treat it like another document.

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