My thoughts last week on using Microsoft OneNote as the fulcrum for creating a page management system for a flatplan generated some interesting results. Not the least of these was an invitation to have a play with a work in progress called the Intelligent Flatplan, a UK product written in Flash.

This is interesting to me for two reasons; one is that it forms one of the categories of cloud computing” I was dubious about a few weeks back, and second, it was usage of Flash that I had not considered. To be fair, my own exposure and use of Flash is around 4 years back so I am probably not fit to judge what may or may not be possible!

The revenue is made by the developers by charging UK0.35 per page per edition which is quite cost effective – if the product lives up to initial promise. Pages can be created in editions, passed through to future editions, adverts placed sections added, page status set and future enhancements include keeping track of revenue and expenses to work out edition profitability. So on the surface, it has the goods.

At this point, I have to say that yes, while the product has immense possibilities, a few niggles need to be knocked off it and a few things added to make it suit my needs and I have been in dialogue with the MD of the company in a most productive way. So what are these niggles? Well of course, your mileage may differ, but for example, I prefer to have colour codings based on the content type (eg News, Review, Tutorial, Feature etc) as against the status of the page. At the moment, Intelligent Flatplan has the symbol for the page ( a square) owning the colour of its status and its edge a colour showing the content type.

It would also be nice to have a page linked to the original document, but as was explained to me, this causes enormous problems with security on the server, not to mention an issue of space. This one they are working on. A few other areas such as the way data is entered needs tidying in my opinion, but I really do feel that this application – and again I stress this is looking at it for my needs – is around 70% there.

If creating flatplans is your thing, have a look at it – it’s free for 14 days in a limited page version.

www.intelligentflatplan.com