Microsoft Onfolio (Web Research Assistant) is an extremely powerful IE add-in for Windows Live Toolbar (toolbar.live.com) - Onfolio offers Blogging, RSS news reader, Screen Capture, Note taking, Offline Web browser, Website Capturing and data sharing capabilities.
Onfolio was founded by J.J. Allaire who previously founded Allaire Corp. that was acquired by Macromedia. Onfolio has been offered to users of both Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, although the Microsoft version of Onfolio is not offered for Firefox. Understandable - but why do they have a WGA plugin for Firefox ?
Microsoft Onfolio (earlier $99) looks inspired by some of the best Firefox extensions like Scrapbook, Sage, BlogThis, ScreenGrab, Httrack (Spiderzilla) and DownloadThemAll. If you spend a good portion of your day doing research on the Web, it's hard to ignore Onfolio.
Microsoft Onfolio add-in integrates an RSS news reader, lets you save bookmarks, capture local copies of web pages, documents, images and snippets of text from the Internet.
Onfolio has two separate interfaces. The Onfolio Deskbar runs as a standalone window, but the app also runs inside your browser by adding new buttons to the browser's toolbar.
Onfolio Site Capture lets you capture an entire website for offline access. You can even fine tune the depth and types of content that gets captured. Onfolio also lets you capture screenshots and clipboard contents.
Once items are captured in Onfolio, you can browse them in Windows style Explorer. Items can be searched based on Text or Properties. You can capture multipage articles and entire lists of Web links.
Onfolio folders can be published to a blog at regular intervals, and individual items can be sent to your blog from Onfolio's RSS news reader and from Onfolio collections. Onfolio logs you in to your blog account and begins a new post with the link in place.
Onfolio directly lets you search, email or post items to your blog. Information collected with Onfolio can be annotated with notes, flags, keywords, highlighting and other tools. Users can then share that data or find it through Windows Desktop Search.
Onfolio Publishers lets you publish a report in a MHT format that can be viewed by anyone using Internet Explorer or Firefox.
The Onfolio RSS reader has an easy-to-read, interactive newspaper view where you can read items grouped by folder, act on them, and have them marked as read when you move to the next item.
Download OnFolio for Windows Live
If you previously purchased Onfolio Personal Edition or Onfolio Professional Edition, you are eligible for a refund.
Exciting stuff. But Microsoft, please don't discontinue Onfolio for Firefox.
Microsoft Press Release | Windows Live Toolbar Site
Onfolio Add-in for Windows Live Toolbar Getting Started Guide (PDF)