How Kolab Meet and integrated collaborative editing boosted my Christmas preparations

And.. its around the corner again – Christmas!

Every year it is a very special time for me and my family. The days get shorter, everyone slows down and reflects on the busy year at home with cups of tea and hot chocolate on the couch, covered in a warm blanket.

At the same time it means Christmas preparations. We are a big family with more than 56 members spread over different cities and countries, gathering each year on different locations to enjoy the Christmas days together. Now the cozy moments on the edge of the commencing winter start to get hectic. Dinner plans have to be made, wish lists to be exchanged and discussed, invitations & Christmas cards have to be designed.

This year I wanted to try to make things a bit easier for everyone. My mom is quite confident in handling a computer and e-mail programs, so I decided that she and I would be using Kolab for our Christmas planning. As we do not yet have a family domain, and I already used a Kolab Now individual account under the domain @kolabnow.com, we decided to simply create a Kolab Now individual account for her, too. The sign-up (https://kolabnow.com/signup/individual) was very straight forward and easy, data was filled out and a verification code send to the external e-mail address. A few minutes later she could already use her new e-mail account (even for free the first 4 weeks).

Next thing was to activate her Kolab Meet voice & video conferencing, which is currently available as public beta. For this she signed in to her Kolab Now dashboard (https://kolabnow.com/dashboard) and subscribed to it by clicking the “user account” section, afterwards clicking again the primary e-mail address. A new window opened with different options to choose from, e.g. the storage quota can be edited as well. Now going back to the dashboard the small Kolab Meet icon appeared and by clicking on it her own personal link showed up that she provided me with via an invitation in the calendar.

My mom was very pleased to be able to see and hear me that well, even 500km apart! We agreed that I would create a draft Christmas card and explained her that we would be able to edit it both at the same time. For this I simply entered the Files section in my Kolab Now webmail client and started to create a new document. It was easy to upload a nice picture from my computer and add some text.

I chose ‘edit document’ in the upper right corner to invite my mom to the edit session. One can just click the big plus, also in the upper right corner to do so. I entered my moms email address (important of course that it was in the same domain: @kolabnow.com) and saved everything. She could change things very smoothly, with me being able to see her changes made when “track changes” was turned on (Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + E).

We than gathered in Kolab Meet again, shared the document via screen sharing (simply clicking the screen share button in the menu) and made it final (we used Chrome as browser but Firefox and other browsers also works well).

For next year we are thinking to maybe take this to the next level with our own family domain and migrate everything to a Group account (https://kb.kolabnow.com/documentation/new-group-account-setup-guide) so that all our 56 family members (well 50, as 6 are still babies) have their own Kolab Groupware account to make things even more easy.