Hi all,
This is an interesting topic, both Nexudus and Cobot have been out there helping coworking spaces for a while and at the moment we’re the two main choices.
Ender, I have sent you an email to see if we can talk later today; I’d like to hear where we’re not fulfilling expectations.
I’m specially interested in your points 3 and 4, social interaction and printing integration.
We have an app called coworkers that lets members add a short bio, a pic, and some links, and browse the list to see who else is at the space. We’ve looked into adding a discussion board there to let them interact directly through Cobot, but this is just an idea at the moment. As you know, we develop Cobot ourselves and we are open to developing additional features (we do it all the time and you can check our blog to see what the latest additions are). It helps to hear feedback from Cobot users to see what’s most wanted. Feel free to drop us an email at [email protected] at any time with suggestions to make Cobot better.
Regarding printing integration, we had conversations with Ezeep to integrate Cobot with their printing platform. They have a great app that lets you manage your printers on the cloud, however, at the moment they have no API yet that we can use to automate this project. If you’re interested, we could find an alternative solution.
Tom, good to hear from you. I’m happy that Nexudus is working for you. I also looked into it when oh-so-long-time-ago I got into this coworking thing, and I like what they do. Besides Carlos and Adrian are my fellow countrymen and I even have a Nexudus t-shirt! Competition is a weird thing in this coworking world :). It was a pity that things didn’t work out with Cobot after such a long time and it’s a pity that such a tiny detail, like an email copy that’s easy to change, made you leave your plans of using Cobot. As you know, at that point we were open to discuss how a member email should look like. I’d still like to hear your feedback about that if you can jump on the phone any time soon. If ‘it sounds like advertising Cobot’ is the current feedback, we definitely need to look into it.
Sharing our contact details with members of spaces using Cobot, however, has proved to be useful sometimes. We receive calls every week from people that’s having trouble booking a room from home or understanding their invoices, or even finding the address of the space. We take care of those when they’re technical queries, or Google the address of the space to tell them which is the closest metro station :).
This said, Cobot is great but not perfect. We actively ask for feedback and always take it into consideration. We manage our space and use what we learn there to improve Cobot, but all coworking spaces are different in some way and it’s hard to know all your special needs. If you come across anything, at any time, that you want to improve in Cobot, feel free to reach me directly at [email protected] or ping me on Skype at cristina.cobot .
Let’s see how this conversation goes on, have a great day,
Cris
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On Wednesday, October 30, 2013 2:57:13 PM UTC+1, Ender Baykal wrote:
Hello everyone,
We’re still in progress of seeking a platform which meets all our needs at once. However, it’s kind of hard to find a platform like that, because we would like to:
1. manage all the membership payment transactions (charge users, accepting new members(coworkers), canceling memberships etc.)
2. track their check-ins to our space (we don’t want to check them in manually, we already have a HID card reader system that allows people to check-in at the front desk, however this card reader application is integrated with Cobot and if we use another platform instead of Cobot, we are not sure that we will be able to use our current HID system with the new platform)
3. We would like to see our members can interact each other on a single platform by posting events, chatting each other, posting something that they find interesting, or even posting job ads etc.
4. manage our printer system (may be by giving our members some credits in order to use the printers in our coworking space)
5. we want our coworkers(members) can easily book our meeting rooms as well as other resources like phone booths.
Besides all these, the user interface of the platform/software should be extremely simple. It shouldn’t be complicated, it needs to look really simple to people to encourage them to use it.
As I mentioned above, we’re still in progress of finding a platform like this. We came up with Nexudus, but I am not sure if it’s going to be helpful and meet our needs. If anyone who already uses Nexudus can give us a feedback, we would appreciate that. In addition, we also appreciate if you suggest us other softwares.
P.S.: We think Project Management softwares (Basecamp, Podio etc.) can’t help us since they’re quiet expensive and kind of complicated and not very user friendly. They have a lot of apps to allow you to customize it based on your needs, but these are not as simple as other softwares.
Thanks everyone!
Indiegrove Team
http://indiegrovejc.com/