cyn.in wiki review: professional online collaboration

cyn.in (pronounced sign in) is something like a blend between a blog and a wiki (bliki). It is specifically designed for online collaboration and keeps an ongoing record of changes to pages and attachments. The WYSIWYG editor is excellent but you can step into code if you want.

The way you work with individual web pages is up to you. You can invite other selected members of your group to collaborate with you, keep the page to yourself or publish on the internet for wider commentary. There are lots of useful innovative features that you need to check out.

cyn.in provider statement

Cyn.in logo“cyn.in at its core, is a software collaboration system. Any information or file stored in cyn.in can be collaborated upon. Be it the documents that you created for your project or the useful article that you published in the intranet, you can effortlessly share them with any other user such that all of you can work on the information or file together. cyn.in eliminates the need for sending files back and forth over email. All your information remains in a central place and is worked or commented upon by all designated collaborators.”

Range of wiki hosting plans

The hosting plans take a bit of explaining, you need to understand what a member is. A member has privileges for online collaboration such as developing a new page and deciding which other members they want to collaborate with them on it. Members of the group form your personal virtual intranet. If you like you can publish pages on the internet which anyone, member or not, can see and comment on.

The cost of plans depends on how many members you have. In the free plan for example, only two members can collaborate on the website. However, this does not stop you publishing on the internet for everyone to see and make comments on the pages. The range of business plans in the table are just examples to give you an idea of the costs.

The free plan allows you two members with 25MB of storage and 125 MB of traffic per month.

The Business plans gives you 1GB of storage per member and 5 GB per member of monthly traffic. The cost decreases the more members you have, for example with 2 to 9 members its $30 per member per month and with over 500 members its $20 per member per month.

Domain names

You choose a sub-domain name: www.YourUserName.cyn.in You cannot use your own domain name.

Content supported

You can do most of what you want with the WYSIWYG editor such as inserting files, images, audio or video that you want in your page or attached to it. Access to html gives you even wider options.

Images - Yes
Flash - No
Audio - Yes
Video - Yes
RSS feeds onto pages - No
Attachments - Yes
Chat - Not supported
Instant messaging - Not supported
Mathematical notations - Not supported
Diagrams - Not supported
Task lists - Not supported
Calendars - Not supported
Maps - Not supported
Shopping basket - No
Content restrictions - No

cyn.in is very visitor friendly

The format of cyn.in is very clean and easy to use wiki. You don’t have a ton of customisation options for the layout but can define the log, header, sidebar and footer. The look is very professional. Navigation is by means of innovative slash tags through which you can combine tags in hierarchical fashions. Any page can have several combinations of slash tags which means your wiki has a virtual hierarchy on which pages can appear in several places.

cyn.in appears to be very well managed. There is an aura of professionalism and requests for help are responded to rapidly. Lack of automatic save when you are editing a page does leave you open to risk of losing your current changes if you lose a connection.

Search engine friendly - No access to meta tags, no site map
Looks match topic - Limited customisation
Easy to read - Yes, very
Clear navigation - Slash tags, convert to automatic menu
Effective wiki search - Yes
Recent activity list - Yes
Wanted pages list - No
Custom template for new pages - Yes
email pages to friends - No
Access by mobile - No
RSS feeds - Yes: includes pages, podcasts, imagecast and filecast.
Easy to make and read comments - Yes
Page history available - Yes

Editing a cyn.in wiki

Cyn.in has one of the best WYSIWYG editors with good handling of text, tables, smilies, and images. Ease of use makes online collaboration easy. It also has some advanced editing options for users who want to step-out beyond WYSIWYG.

WYSIWYG - Excellent WYSIWYG editor
Markup - No
HTML - Yes
CSS - No
javascript - No
Spellcheck - Yes

cyn.in wiki language options

cyn.in has limited language options in WYSIWYG mode.

Translations - No
International characters - Not supported in WYSIWYG
Right to left writing - Not supported
Help language - English

Permissions for online collaboration can be finely defined

Access to the pages of cyn.in wikis can be very finely defined. You decide for each page who and how people can access it. Each page is assigned to one of four categories.

Internet - Anyone can see the page and, if they sign in as a guest, can make comments on it
Intranet - Other members can see and make comments on the page
Shared - Only members you have invited to co-author the page, can see and make changes to it
Personal - Only you has any access to the page

Cyn.in Security

cyn.in has good security features, which extend to any files attached to a page. Not only are revisions of pages kept but also a new version of a file is created each time it is updated and the old one kept.

Keeps out spambots - Required registration
Blocks vandals - Required registration
Lockable pages - Yes
Can review changes to pages - Yes
Can revert to a previous edition of a page - Yes
Can restore your site from a local back up - No
Censored word list - No
Privacy policy - No
Secure information transfer - No
Secure attachments - Attachments attached to individual pages and old versions stored when updated.

Wiki Management

Automatic save - No
Site statistics - No
email notifications - Yes, very flexible
Income from Ads - Not supported
Provider placed Ads - No
Stable provider company - Not sure

Help and support for cyn.in wikis

cyn.in appears to be a young company and claims 12,000 users. The user forum and blog have not a lot of entries yet. Help is through online helpdesk.

Loyal wiki community - Not yet
Community forum - Yes
FAQs - No
Help - Yes, via help desk
Technical support - Yes
Server support 24/7 - Not sure

cyn.in is definitely worth a look if you are interested in high quality online collaboration with flexible page management options. The free option provides you with a useful space on the internet that you can keep private or share with the world. If you work on collaborative projects, you need to check out cyn.in.

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2 Comments

  1. bridgespotter
    Posted September 25, 2007 at 2:00 am | Permalink

    Very interesting, never heard of this one before

  2. Dinky
    Posted July 24, 2008 at 7:37 am | Permalink

    cyn.in v2 is now open source

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