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Getting Started

It's easy to get started with Kamune.
  1. Create your account
    Click on the link above to sign up and create your account. No credit card is necessary for the free basic account. You sign in to Kamune with your gmail account, since Kamune runs on Google's app engine. Don't worry, Kamune data and gmail are separate, neither accesses the other. If you don't have a gmail account, you can create one during setup. If you received an invitation by email, you can also click on the link to sign up.

  2. Create a room for a project
    Use the "create a room" link on the quick start menu to create a room for each project.

  3. Invite others to the room
    Use "invite others" link to invite the people you work with in this project, to this room. You provide their email addresses (they don't have to be gmail addresses) and full names. You choose whether you want the invitation to come from your gmail address or from the system account. If you choose the sytem account, make sure their spam filter doesn't trap these invitations. You'll see the names of the people you invited, in the access list with the word "pending" added to their names until they accept the invitation. It is easy to get started with Kamune.
  4. Collaborate - Topic Centric
    Each room has a logbook. This can serve as a record of the group work and as a group forum. You write your status or your ideas in the logbook. You can read other's notes and comment on them. You can upload or download files from the room. You can use the welcome message for announcements or room descriptions.
  5. Collaborate - People Centric
    You can see which of your colleagues are online and which rooms they are in. If they are in a room that you have access to as well, you can join them and chat. You can create simple slides and share them with everyone in the room. You can send them a bubble (a short expiring message) with a link to a file a room. To get their attention immediately, you can send them a whisper. You can also send them a text message if they configured Kamune to receive those messages. You can access these functions by clicking on the user icon, or by clicking on "communicate" in the quick start menu.
  6. Personalize the experience
    You can click on "Settings" in quick start menu. You can upload your photo and change your image. You can select a Kamune color scheme of your choice with "theme". You can type in your mobile phone information if you want to allow your colleagues to reach you by text messages. You can also specify which email address you want to be notified by. You can customize the room and change its image as well.
  7. Establish a workflow
    Create new rooms for each of the projects and topics you are involved in. Invite the right people to the right rooms. You can setup a pattern to go from room to room to catch up and contribute. You can be stay in touch with email and text messages, when you are not on Kamune.

Typical User Scenarios

  1. Small Business - Easy jump start
    If you are a very small business with fewer than a dozen employees who wear many hats and handle a lot of different tasks Kamune can help. Especially if you have no dedicated tech support people to buy, install and maintain software. Getting by with just email alone makes it hard to keep track of things.

    On Kamune, you can setup a room for each employee. You can setup shared rooms for each project and task. This keeps things organized, keeps a record of things yet keeps things flexible and spontaneous.
  2. Multitasking project members
    If you are working on 3 or 4 project simultaneously with a dozen people. Let's say each of those dozen people is also working 3 or 4 different or common projects. This is pretty common in companies where all the specialties (product, marketing, sales, support) are in separate departments and you need to bring various people together to complete a project.

    Kamune can bring these people together yet keep their worlds separate to not overwhelm them. You can create rooms for each project and for each department and invite the right people. Each employee will see the rooms that they are involved in, and have all the people they work with available, without being overwhelmed with everything else that's going on.
  3. Working with external partners
    If you have an intranet for all of your employees and don't have a simple way to work with external partners or vendors without giving them access to your intranet, Kamune can provide a secure shared space. Employees and the partners can use Kamune to share the files, status and notes.
  4. Telecommuting and working on the road
    If you are working from or on the road a lot, it's hard to stay in the loop and stay on the radar for the main office people. Kamune can help you and your team to mutually stay in touch. Also, running into your team members in various Kamune rooms can spark spontaneous conversations and help stay on their minds even if you are out of sight.
  5. Multiple offices
    If the team members on your project work from different offices, it is not uncommon to be more trusting of local team members and less trusting of remote team members. Kamune can mitigate that when you virtually see each other equally in various project rooms and interact with one another.
  6. Consultants
    If you are working with multiple clients, Kamune can help you organize and keep your work with each client separate and help you make progress on each one in sequence.


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Human-Centered Online Collaboration with Kamune

Read more (external link)
Kamune
Email overload and Kamune's new collaborative work space
John Cook, TechFlash
General articles
BlackBerry's Many Distractions
Newsweek
You've Got Trouble
Dave Barry, New York Times
Multitasking is Ddumbing Us Down
The Atlantic
Multitasking Woes
New York Times
How Many Emails Are Sent Every Day?
About.com
Academic papers
The Cost of Email Interrupton
Loughborough University
Disruption from Email
Microsoft Research
No Task Left Behind? The Nature of Fragmented Work
UC Irvine School of Information and Computer Science
Interruptibility and Interface Design
Daniel McFarlane and Kara Latorella

Copyright © 2009 Navaraga Corporation