Samepage is a social tool by Kerio based on the metaphor of shared pages composed of information organized in sections of files, tasks, events, and other information types. The tool has a hierarchical organization of workspaces, where each workspace has children that are workspaces or pages, more or less like a file system.

One of the odd inclusions is tables, which have spreadsheet-like capabilities. Here are the various kinks of components possible. A mashup is an editable HTML element.

Superficially, Samepage reminds me of 37signals’ Backpack, a tool I used for a few years, but it overcomes some of Backpack’s limitations. In particular, Samepage allows for comments on pages and in each section of the page.

Unlike Backpack, Samepage has an activity stream so users can see all the recent comments made in any page they can access. There is also a complete history of all changes made to a page, and the system — somewhat annoyingly — asks for a reason for any changes made that aren’t comments, and these reasons wind up in the page’s comments, not the history.

The real failure of the system for me is that tasks are not assignable.

What is the point of having a system based on shared access that does not include task assignment?

The bottom line

There are some interesting ideas in Samepage — like mashups and tables and the possibilities for those being integrated in some way with other kinds of components — but nothing much is done with those possibilities. For example, imagine being able to make a mashup from an image, a table, and a link from different pages. However, there is no way to get the URL of a single element — for example, an image on a page. Just as interesting would be making a table from other elements, like a table using information from the tasks on a page. This is also not supported.

Samepage does a good job of rendering various document types online, like text files, documents, PDFs, and PowerPoint decks, but lack annotation that would make it a good tool for commenting and review of docs.

As I said earlier, the killer for me is the lack of task assignment, which is a fundamental aspect of cowork. Without that, it’s just not usable.