Review: Woobius

Woobius is a web app aimed at architects and engineers, designed to enable them to collaborate online.  The main features are:

• Drop box - Quickly share files with colleagues
• Vault - Manage formal documents, track changes to them, and issue documents to colleagues with an expiration date
• Companies - Give your clients access
• Dashboard - Get an overview of activity

Workflow

The workflow within Woobius has been designed to work well for people in the architecture and engineering industries.  Although I don’t work in these industries, the processes were familiar as a freelancer and consultant.

The vault offers a full audit trail for both changes and downloads.  Knowing when clients have downloaded documents is very useful — especially if you issue a redesign and they don’t give feedback until the sign-off date.

Interface

The interface is a sophisticated Flex app.  It doesn’t feel too flash-heavy, it feels light and web-native.  People from the targeted industries will feel comfortable using it.

Woobius is very good at providing content for “empty pages” — when you initially access it there’s a healthy amount of inline help and help popups.

Detailed help popups complete with screenshots appear the first time a feature is accessed.  This is great for the Vault, where the usage is deeper than other areas of the app:

Pricing

Woobius pricing is based on storage.  You can try it out for free, or pay £10/GB per month, with an initial £10 setup fee.  This makes it incredible value for money.