Better Workgroup Notes

So there’s a group of you working together and you want to share notes about the project you’re working on. Email is the obvious solution but if y’all are like most online folks, the messages about your project will have to compete with the cruft in your inbox and run the risk of getting lost amongst the everyday exchanges you’re involved in.

So, it’s obvious that email is not going to work well and you probably don’t have time to wrestle with IT or have time to research an alternative so, lucky you, I have a really great solution for you and what’s really cool is that it works across mobile platforms (there are Android and iOS apps but, alas, no Blackberry app) as well as through a Web interface. This paragon of sharing is a service called Catch.

Catch is simple to use: You create notes on any of the supported platforms and on some of the supported mobile platforms you can also add audio recordings and photos. These notes are synchronized across all platforms when the same login is used and with the recently launched “streams” feature, you can share notes with a group of Catch users.

The free service provides up to three streams with text, web clips, photos, and voice memos, and up to 70MB of new content per month.

The Pro account ($4.99 per user per month or $44.99 per annum) which increases that to 10 streams, allows the attachment of office documents to private and shared streams, and allows for up to 1GB of new content per month. The as yet un-launched Premier account ups the limits to 50 streams and 5GB of new content per month.

Catch also provides browser extensions for clipping content to your Catch account and there’s a Web site clipping service that allows Catch users to clip your content adding the source URL to the saved data. There is also an affiliate program but, to be honest, I don’t see a compelling proposition in either.

On the other hand, there’s also a simple Application Programming Interface (API) that makes it easy to add Catch services to your own applications and that is a powerful idea.

I see the core Catch service as very compelling … it is simple, elegant, robust, effective, and the service options are good value.

So tell me: How do you handle workgroup communications? If you’ve looked at Catch, what do you think?