There are two great pieces of utility software that I have purchased in the past 12 months – FolderShare and Onfolio. I have blogged about FolderShare before, but I don’t think I have mentioned Onfolio.
Onfolio is a tool for collecting and organizing information; it integrates into your browser (IE and FireFox), into Outlook and has a standalone desktop application version. You use it to create “Collection” files. These are single files that pull all of the clippings you make together into one place. You can capture links, whole web pages, snippets of a page, images, PDFs, in fact any file you can drag and drop onto the treeview, and they are all then available offline.
I have been using Onfolio in conjunction with FolderShare for a while now to ensure that all of my “information”, the stuff I care about, is available to me at all of the computers I regularly use without me having to think about it. Each machine has Onfolio installed, and I have my Collections folder shared using FolderShare across all of the machines. So, when I find something useful that I want to keep, I clip it to Onfolio, and minutes later all of my other machines have that same data available. Genius.
A little while ago, my employer (Microsoft) showed how much they agreed with my taste in utilities by buying the FolderShare company, and then making the software free to all. Now they have done it again by buying Onfolio, and rolling the product into the new Windows Live Toolbar; they have also made this product free too. Mildly annoying since I paid for Onfolio back last year, but great news that my favourite utilities are now both part of the Windows Live family of products.
