What is Goozzee ?

If, like me, your job implies taking lots of notes, creating documents about various subjects, noting tips & tricks about this or that in some text files somewhere on your hard drive,... and then trying to remember where you saved it, and what is related to what, loosing time trying to find the right information in the right document... Then maybe Goozzee could help you. Well, at least, I designed it to help me in such situations....

Goozzee intends to be some king of documentation repository. A place where you can take rapid notes – like during a meeting – , and upload documents – spreadsheets, texts, sound, short movies... any kind.

But if its only use was to store notes and documents, then many existing softwares would do it perfectly. Even some well organized file system could help... Nevertheless, having hundreds of files containing notes, graphics or spreadsheets about hundreds of different subjects is a nice documentation, but it's pretty hard to find your way among such a sea of data : there's no way to easily navigate from document to document, and even worse, only you can find your way in this mess : somebody else would have to dig it with some appropriate search tool, loosing time, and often missing some crucial information...

That's where Goozzee shines.

Goozzee allows you to organize data into Topic Maps, which means that you can create associations between all your notes/documents, creating some kind of knowledge base through which you can easily search and browse.

Since Goozzee's data is saved in a relational database, you can access it from anywhere on you network, using the Goozzee client software... This client software is also multi-platform : there are versions for Windows, Mac/OSX and Linux, and other operating systems could be easily supported in the future. But being multi-platform doesn't mean you'll have to fight with some nasty java GUI. No. Goozzee is pure fast C++. And I try to make it as intuitive as possible, with contextual menus and drag & drop support as often as possible. When you're lost, wondering how to do something, just right-click and the contextual menu should help you most of the time...

This user guide will try to show you what you can do with Goozzee, and how to do it. First it will explain what are topic maps, so that you better understand how Goozzee works, then it will present the various functionalities already developed in the current release, starting with basic use, up to its most complex but powerful features.

I hope you'll enjoy using this software as much as I enjoy creating it. I would highly appreciate your comments, critics, advise about bugs or parts of that documentation that are not clear, functionalities you'd like to see improved, or even your feature requests...

Do not hesitate to contact me at michel.laglasse@gmail.com.