ONFOLIO PROFESSIONAL

What's it do?

Onfolio is a PC application for collecting, organizing, and sharing information found online. Integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer and compatible with Microsoft Office, it provides tools for collecting content such as links, text snippets, images, Web pages, and documents and allows for annotating, organizing and searching collected content, and sharing research in documents, emails, and HTML reports.


Does it do what it promises?

Reviewer 1. Since I never got a working version installed it is impossible for me to tell. In my case, the answer was NO.

Reviewer 2. Yes but with reservations. I think it should be made clearer that many of the features such as sharing files through email are only available if the party with whom you are sharing is also using Internet Explorer. I also think the necessity of installing Microsoft .NET Framework should be made more "upfront and center."

Reviewer 3. Yes. It makes Web research and assembling Web information much easier.

Reviewer 4. Yes.

Reviewer 5. No. The Getting Started Guide claims that it is “easy to use” and “will only take you a few minutes to learn.” After struggling with it for a number of hours over several days, even with the assistance of the support people at Onfolio, I have not been able to successfully perform the first steps. My evaluation, therefore, will not get past the “Collecting Content” stage; I will be unable to comment at all on the “Organizing Research”, the “Sharing Information” or the “Publishing Reports and Websites” functions of the program.

Reviewer 6. Yes, with an outstanding degree of success in its technical design and usability.

Onfolio Responded: Onfolio provides a number of ways to share captured content through email and most of these do not require Internet Explorer. To send a copy of a page that was saved locally or a report with multiple embedded web pages, Onfolio uses the MHT file format, which is the industry standard format for storing all the elements of a web page in a single file. Internet Explorer’s support for the MHT standard gives Onfolio users the advantage of knowing that most computer users will be able to view saved web content they want to share without installing a separate viewer. In situations where users want to share locally copied web pages with people who do not have Internet Explorer, Onfolio supports publishing that content as a standard Website that can be posted on a server or emailed in a compressed file, such as Zip. (See below for comments on the use of the Microsoft .NET Framework.)


Was it easy to install?

Reviewer 1. No. It downloaded in about 90 seconds on a DSL connection. Upon beginning the installation, I needed to stop to download .NET framework, an estimated 5 minute DSL download for this required component. After the .NET framework completed installation and Onfolio completed installation I ran Internet Explorer. The left side of the screen where my Favorites usually are, and where Onfolio was supposed to be was greyed out with a simple "X" in the upper right corner. I tried clicking on the Onfolio icons in the toolbars and the program crashed with the error message that "the type initializer for 'System.Net.Dns' threw an exception." Rebooting and repeating the above steps resulted in the same error message. IWent to knowledge base online at Onfolio's site and found my problem described at: http://www.onfolio.com/support/kb/okb106.cfm The first solution, activating the program from Onfolio's Help section, was difficult to follow because there was no activate option available from Onfolio Help as activated from Start-All Programs-Onfolio-Documentation-Onfolio Help. Starting Onfolio itself results in it opening as a feature within Internet Explorer (IE). Thus, the help menu there related only to IE. Coming to a dead end there, I explored the second solution which might involve editing the registry, something I feel capable of doing, but not a safe or comfortable procedure for many users. I checked the logfile and did not find the error message cited in the knowledge base. Just to be sure, I checked the registry and found that the settings described were as they should be. Looking further through the knowledge base,  http://www.onfolio.com/support/kb/okb108.cfm , I found that Activation and Use can be complicated or blocked by using a personal firewall such as Zonealarm or Black Ice. I had permitted LAN and internet access for all requests through Zonealarm as the program installed. This works for every other program I have ever installed and it should work here. The knowledge base's hindsight recommendation to disable Zonealarm during installation is a blunt force solution that is unacceptable in my opinion. Also, if this is a known issue, there should be a recommendation/warning message during installation telling you what to do about firewalls during the installation process, not after. I uninstalled Onfolio, turned off Zonealarm, and reinstalled Onfolio. This did nothing to correct the problem. At this point, I sent email to technical support. Reply was received 1.5 hours later giving a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];826757 , "FIX: Socket Initialization Does Not Succeed if Your Computer Has More Than 50 Network Bound Protocols". They have a hotfix that doesn't sound well tested. It is not available on the Web. In order to use it, one has to contact a Microsoft tech support person directly and possibly incur special fees to do so according to their Website. I e-mailed my reservations back to tech support with a request for further suggestions. Their final reply:

Sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused for you. If you read on the Microsoft site for the hotfix, they state 'This problem occurs if you have any combination of network adapters and protocols that causes your computer to have more than 50 network bound protocols". If you open your system info file by going to Start-Program Files-Accessories-System Tools-System Info, then navigate to Components-Network and count up the total number of Adapters and Protocols being used, it will be more than 50. We are currently working with Microsoft to find ways get this patch certified and more readily distributable.

Regards,
The Onfolio Team

I checked as recommended and, sure enough there were about 50 protocols on my laptop despite having only 4 Nework Adapters installed on my system and not all of them currently enabled .Not knowing how to remove excessive protocols without ruining my system setup leaves me with the options of stopping here or making a paid call to Microsoft for an uncertified patch which carries more warnings than I'm comfortable risking. Therefore, I am stopping.

Reviewer 2. No. This is a large download. With Microsoft .Net included it is a 32MB download. If you are on a dial-up you are talking hours, not minutes to download.

Reviewer 3. Yes, I had no problems installing this program, although it only works with Windows XP and 2000.

Reviewer 4. Yes.

Reviewer 5. No. Actually the installation seemed to go easily enough when I first ran the setup procedure. I was able to load it into the folder of my choice. But from then on, I was not able to do any “Capturing” at all. So I uninstalled it, and ran the setup again. This time, I let it go into its own default places, but I had no more success with this process than the first time. I also had problems with the Activation process (translated, this means, registering the program so that it was no longer in “trial period” mode.) Oddly enough, this seemed to correct itself with no help from me. So, it is really a “buggy” program, and is perhaps more in a beta stage than a properly working product.

Reviewer 6. Yes, very straightforward to install and activate, no problems encountered.


Good Points

Reviewer 1. No spyware was detected by SpyBot on scan after installation. Reasonably fast response online from tech support

Reviewer 2. Personally, I am at somewhat of a loss here. As a professional researcher and one who has written and published three Master Thesis, two PhD dissertations, as well as several books and professional journal articles, I found little offered by Onfolio Professional vis a vis research that one cannot do with bookmarks or "favorites" collections. It does, as it says, allows you to collect, organize, annotate, and share the information you find online, but so do many other, in my opinion, much better programs that leave a much smaller footprint and are less expensive than Onfolio Professional. This is a powerful program, but remember that "powerful" generally translates into having a big resource appetite.

Reviewer 3. It is a very easy program to use, and it makes Web research much easier. It is very easy to collect, organize, and present information gathered with this product. It allows you to collect entire Web pages, or just the part you are interested in, organize the collected bits, and collect your information on a page to present. As a bit of an information junkie, I was very impressed with the power and ease-of-use of Onfolio Pro.

Reviewer 4. It is very easy to use and I really liked the report function. I also appreciated the tutorial that was available after the install was finished. This is exactly what my children need when doing research for school on the Web. I had several collections going in no time gathering data from the Web. The Mail functionality also seemed like it would be useful, although I didn't get a chance to use it.

Reviewer 5. There are two ways to Capture information. One, called the Deskbar, works directly from your desktop. In this mode, you do not have to be on the Internet, but can use it to collect information from various documents and programs that you may be working on. Once you have collected the data from these various programs, you can use Onfolio to organize it and prepare a report, or do whatever you wish with it. I experimented with this set of functions, trying to capture information from a number of formats. Word documents were fine. Excel did not work when I tried to paste it into the Deskbar pane, but would if I pasted it into the Onfolio Windows tray icon. I could copy text from an Acrobat .PDF file and paste it into the Deskbar, but it lost its formatting. When I copied a graphic image into the Deskbar, and double-clicked on it in the Deskbar, it simply reopened the image in its original graphics program. However, with more experimentation, I was able to get information from a number of different applications, collected together in the one Onfolio folder.

Reviewer 6. Outstanding online tutorials covering all aspects of the program, by far the best I have ever encountered. By listening to these four tutorials totaling about 15 minutes, a user should emerge capable of using 80% of the program’s functionality. Someone should definitely get a big gold star for this work. Excellent overall design with respect to functionality and user interface; a program well thought out and well presented. I can’t recall a required function ever being more than one click away. Customer technical support showed technical depth, sincere interest in the user’s problem, and usually able to suggest a good workaround for problems for which no fix yet exists. It made one feel that they really cared. Also, that they go the extra mile of issuing a free 1.01 update to fix an initial release bug that escaped testing, another indication of really caring about their customers. I was impressed with their statement of core values that they hold themselves to, really left me with a warm feeing about the company and people there.

Onfolio Responds: Onfolio provides a number of capture-related features that are not available in Bookmarks or Favorites including the ability to save entire Web pages, HTML snippets, images, PDF files, and documents. Unlike Favorites, Onfolio also supports annotating captured items with information such as a comment, author, and keywords, and it automatically records the source URL and search terms used to find the item. In addition to storing a variety of content types, Onfolio provides tools for sorting, flagging, and searching saved content. The loss of formatting from Adobe Acrobat Reader is a function of the way Acrobat copies content to the clipboard. A full version of Acrobat gives Acrobat users a wider range of options for how they copy information out of Acrobat.


Weak Points

Reviewer 1. Trying to get this program to work properly was an awkward and unpleasant experience..

Reviewer 2. First and foremost with this reviewer is the necessity of needing to download Microsoft.NET Framework to utilize this program. This seems to be overkill. While Onfolio claims that it has tied this product to .Net Framework to keep it viable for future Windows versions, the next Windows OS in the works is Longhorn slated for a 2006 release. Certainly, there will be updated versions of Onfolio before then so why tie this program to something quite unnecessary at the present for most users? Second, I am annoyed by its lack of integration with browsers other than that old tried but not so true and certainly outdated Internet Explorer when there are so many better browsers appearing on the market everyday. You can capture content from other browsers through a standalone "deskbar," but that is really rather clunky. Third, and again to do with Internet Explorer, Onfolio makes claim that you can share your content with others via email. Well, only if the receiver of your email is also using Internet Explorer. So, I am not really impressed with its sharing features. Besides, MHTML & FTP are very 1999 and impossible for non-technical users. Four, Onfolio is very intolerant of any error on the page and will wait indefinitely for an ad to load. Five, as for Customer Support, I have no idea. I tried eight times on different days and at different hours of the day to go to their home site (www.onfolio.com). Unfortunately, the page would not load. (And no, it was not my computer as I had no difficulty loading other pages, thank you!). Finally, $80.00 is a steep price to pay, as is the $30.00 standard edition, for a program that requires so much computer resource to do so little that is truly unique, and with such limited parameters all which are tied to Microsoft.

Reviewer 3. The only speed bump I encountered was that a separate style sheet file was be edited outside the program if altering of the report style definitions is desired.

Reviewer 4. The menus seemed to have difficulty displaying the highlighting bar, it appeared that when moving the mouse over the menu it didn't realize I had left the menu item and the program left a portion of the menu highlighted. There doesn't seem to be a way to turn it off once it is running, short of using the task manager.

Reviewer 5. My main interest in the program was to use it to collect information from different Web sites. In this mode, I really cannot give it any good points, as I have not been able to get it to Collect Information successfully. I can say, though, that the support people have been responsive and did help me over the first layer of problems that I have had with the program. However, after several hours of struggling with the program at the next little step, I have given up on it for now. Anyone else running this on the 30-day trial, unless they had a burning need for the program to work, would have uninstalled it long ago. Coming back to my installation problems, it seems that the mere presence of certain programs on the hard drive, even if they are not active or running, interfere with the Capture process. In order to get the Explorer mode to capture at all, I had to uninstall, and completely remove an anti-popup program which I have used, but which I do not have actively running. I suspect that some other program(s) I have used in the past, but which do not actually run, will also have to be uninstalled before I will be able to use Onfolio. This is a major drawback to the Onfolio program. Their developers cannot expect to specify which programs their clients are allowed to have installed on their computer.

Reviewer 6. I found that the amount of screen real estate taken up by the Onfolio Collection Explorer and Item List, even when reduced to minimum practical width, is visually intrusive and noticeably diminishing to my Internet viewing experience. Nor is the Closing/Reopening this panel any better answer. It would be very good to have this pane hideable out-of-view to the left side of the screen until needed, and this should be doable without much additional programming effort. Incremental pricing of the Professional version of $50 more than Standard seems unjustified to me on the basis of the additional function provided. While I believe the Standard version is worth more than the current price of $30, I don’t believe it is wise to set a $30 price for present functionality but discuss in the press the prospect of a future price increase when out of Beta. An intangible complaint: as well designed as I found Onfolio, use in practice took much longer than I expected. It was just hard to get into an effective rhythm of surfing-then-extracting. Perhaps this is a personal deficiency, but worrisome enough to mention. I don’t usually pay much attention to packaging and marketing issues as opposed to function, but I found the choice of the name “Onfolio” as non-descript and non-memorable, and the choice of colors (purple and gold) on the printouts dreary, Both are, in my opinion, much in need of some cosmetic improvements. In the Registration Dialog, having to enter all five groups of 5-characters, one group at a time rather than copying and pasting all five together is surely an easy fix. That kind of excessive, unnecessary “make work” leaves a bad taste before even taking the first step into the program. License limiting use to only one machine would have been a problem to me, an I expect most people. My compliments that they recognized this by the v1.01 release and updated their terms and conditions to include usage for a second machine. In trying to capture a map from an Expedia Website, I encountered the following problem: Onfolio could not capture the item. This might occur when attempting a capture in an application Onfolio doesn’t support.” This was not a big deal, but it did raise the question exactly what/which are the applications Onfolio doesn’t support, and why.

Onfolio Responds: One of the mechanisms that Onfolio provides for sharing Web content is to generate or author reports in the MHT file format. The advantage of this capability is that it provides a way to share multiple Web pages, files, images, snippets, and links all together in a single file viewable in the browser. There is no other industry standard file format that supports putting a Website in a single file. Like other Internet standards, MHT has been around for some time, but Onfolio is the first tool to provide an authoring environment specifically designed to create MHT documents for sharing collected Internet content. Onfolio also makes it possible to publish these reports as Websites with RSS feeds. Onfolio works with the major pop-up blocking tools such as the Google toolbar. The Collection Explorer, which opens in the left pane in the browser, does not need to be open to capture content. It can be easily opened and closed with the F7 function key or by clicking in the toolbar. Auto-hide would be difficult to implement in the browser, but we will provide it in the next release for the Deskbar, which is the stand-alone version of the Collection Explorer. The suggestion to change how Activation Keys are copied into the Activation dialog box is a good one, and we are planning to change that in the next release.


Other Comments

Reviewer 1. Here's what Fred Langa had to say about .NET framework in his July 7, 2003 Langalist newsletter (quoted by permission):

".Net is a Microsoft initiative that so far offers almost nothing at all for end users, except the hassle of a huge, 40MB install. Even Microsoft's own .Net propaganda pages stress its value is mainly to developers --- and mostly corporate developers, at that. For example, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/productinfo/features/default.aspx, Microsoft lists .Net benefits such as "Realize New Business Opportunities, Reduce Time-to-Market, Write Less Code".Even Microsoft's own WindowsUpdate lists .Net as an optional install--- nothing from Microsoft yet requires .Net, and not even Microsoft considers it an essential or critical update.

Reviewer 2. As a professional educator, writer, and researcher the concern that the ocean of information on the Web will impact negatively on students' ability to synthesize information is a reality. Too many students today simply spew back factoids that they have clipped and pasted from one site or another all in the name of "research." Now with such programs as Onfolio, not only does the task become easier but they can now "share" their research with one another. While I am not necessarily calling for a return to reading card catalogues, knowing the Guide to Periodicals, using microfiche, or ransacking library shelves-although these "lost skills" are still necessary tools for the serious researcher-I do believe that the most valuable skill for a researcher (and research is what Onfolio proposes to facilitate) is not gathering facts, but rather the ability for thoughtful research, careful analysis, and intelligent reporting of that research. I am afraid that Onfolio does not support that concern or ambition. I was able to install and run only on my newest computer using Windows XP Home. It will not operate on Windows systems other than Windows XP or on computers using less than Pentium III. I wonder if the people at Onfolio realize (or care) how many people there are still using Windows 98 (ask Microsoft and they will tell you many more than even they thought!) or processors other than Intel (ever hear of Athlon?) let alone alternate operating systems such as Mac or Linux or other Unix-type systems.

Reviewer 3. I found this program to be very useful. It almost makes itself a required tool for those who do research online.

Reviewer 4. The toolbar button should work more like the existing IE buttons, that is, when the Onfolio pane is displayed the button should be highlighted.

Reviewer 5. I would like to compliment the support staff. They not only answered, quickly, by email, but called me long-distance to walk through various scenarios with me in an effort (only partly successful, as it turns out) to get the program do what it is supposed to do. Three other features hold out hope that the troubles I have been having can possibly be resolved. On the Onfolio Website there are “Knowledge Base” articles, User Forums (a kind of bulletin board where you can describe a problem you are having, and the support staff, or other users, can give suggestions to resolve difficulty), and a Suggest a Feature item, under the “Help” Menu.

Reviewer 6. An excellent design and implementation of a program whose time and need in the marketplace have clearly arrived.

Onfolio Responds: Choosing to develop Onfolio with C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework instead of using C or C++ could be seen as controversial, however we believe that trading off a larger download for users who do not already have the framework for more capabilities and functionality, which we were able to deliver with the reduced development time, was ultimately a good tradeoff for users. Moreover, we are optimistic that embracing Microsoft’s stated strategy for the future of Windows software development will enable us to continue to deliver greater value in the future. As a percentage of our user base, the number of users who have encountered installation problems with the .NET Framework has been very small. In the academic market, the feedback that we have received from customers is that the ability to save and organize Internet information more quickly combined with the ability to automatically track the original source material frees time for analysis, synthesis and publishing. Not all academic research is Internet-intensive and not all researchers are well organized, but for those people who do spend time gathering information from the Internet for their research, it seems that increasing the productivity of saving, annotating, and organizing that information is valuable.


Will you continue to use it?

Reviewer 1. No.

Reviewer 2. No. It is already uninstalled.

Reviewer 3. Yes, definitely.

Reviewer 4. Yes.

Reviewer 5. I will try some more to get it to work, but if I continue to have difficulties, I will uninstall it and wait for some of the bugs to be worked out.

Reviewer 6. Yes, definitely. It fills an important and timely need. Facility in using the tool is a concern, but its considerable productivity potential is definitely worth an extended practice curve.

Back