I recently got myself a Mixed Grill, part thereof is the Joyent collaboration suite. Rails is calling, simplicity at its best.

Joyent Connector provides each member of your team with email, calendars, address books, and file storage, all over the web, and easily shared with the other members of your team.

All apps are nice and fresh looking and easy to use and stripped from every feature one possibly might not use, and that’s really all there is. Well almost. What makes Joyent a very special suite is that there are 4 intrinsic paradigms:

  • Sharing. You can restrict access, but everything is visible to everyone by default.
  • Comments. You can add comments to each and every item (this is something I’m really missing in Gmail.)
  • Tags. In Joyent you can tag everything.
  • Smart Groups. You can define a set of rules and only the corresponding items are displayed.

Come up with consistent naming conventions for your tags (i.e. a unique tag for each project,…) and the combined power of tags and smart groups is actually all you need for many use cases.

Another goodie is the Connector, which gathers notifications and items from all other apps and displays them at one central place.

What I’m missing is the ability to write (and share and collaborate on) notes and to create (and share and collaborate on) lists. It would be fantastic if one could create Writeboards or Writely documents or Ta-Da lists or Instikis directly from within Joyent (so that they can be shared and easily accessed), but since these apps are readily available and free, it actually would do if there would be some sort of dashboard to collect all entry points.

Under the bottom line: Joyent is brilliant.