Category: Software

Success Disaster – Twitter to Jaiku

This is one of those “hope to have” challenges where adoption happens so quickly that the business is unable to keep pace and scale out.  Users, regardless of how compelling the service is,  will only put up with reliability shortcomings for so long.  From the comments, it sounds like users will put up with it for a bit longer, but with alternatives emerging, Twitter needs to scale quickly.
Making The Switch From Twitter to Jaiku

Document Collaboration – more than screensharing a document

The following is a review of Microsoft’s new beta, SharedView. It appears to be an attempt to merge document collaboration with web conferencing’s screen-sharing capabilities. As the review points out, screen-sharing is useful for real-time collaboration, but it limits the collaboration to single-user control over the editing experience. This type of workflow has been supported in web conferencing solutions (including Acrobat Connect) for years…

User research indicates this isn’t enough to solve the distributed document collaboration problem. Google has started to try to address this through Docs and Spreadsheets, along with a variety of other vendors that have recently cropped up in the web 2.0 bubble. Looks like MSFT has a ways to go in order to provide an effective, real-time, document collaboration solution.
First look: Microsoft SharedView beta

The “document collaboration” journey begins for me

I’ve recently taken on responsibility for a couple of new services at Adobe, including CreatePDF and Document Center.  These are both excellent services that provide simple value-propositions for individuals around document collaboration.  Both of these services allow for “try and buy” experiences, which you can sign-up for at the following URLs.  Enjoy, and let me know your feedback about how we can improve these services.
Create PDFs of virtually any file format:

Create Adobe® PDF Online: Easily convert and create PDF documents

and then apply policy-protection for electronic documents (think virtual-shredder, DRM for documents, etc…)

Adobe Document Center 

and of course, I’m still working on Acrobat Connect (web conferencing)

Random Email Stats…

A wise man once said:  "Don’t confuse motion with progress."  That could also be applied to email volume.  I use X1’s desktop search engine on my work computer, which indexes all of my email/attachments/docs/etc…  I am a pack-rat with email, and have archived every single email I’ve received at my current company.  I was recently in a meeting where we were discussing email proliferation and our reliance on it as a collaboration tool, and I decided to run a couple of queries with X1 to see what my usage looked like.  Here’s this relatively useless, but scary, information:

Range:  From June 2003 – December 5, 2006

Received Email Stats:

  • Total Emails:  130,000 emails
  • Total Emails with attachments:  31,341
  • Top Email Sender (either To or CC’d me):  4194 (and counting)
  • PowerPoint Presentations Sent to me: 1199 (and counting)

Sent Email Stats:

  • Total Emails I’ve Sent:   32,417 emails
  • 2004 Emails Sent:  8704 emails
  • 2005 Emails Sent:  9293 emails
  • 2006 Emails Sent (and counting):  11,332 emails

All of this totals up to about 8GBs of information sitting in several .pst files on my computer.  Does any of this total up to productivity?  Hmmm…

More On-line Presentation Tools…while Presenter celebrates its seventh birthday…

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Preezo Enters Online Office Race

It’s articles like this that remind to keep in perspective how great the value proposition of Adobe Presenter (formally Macromedia Breeze Presenter) is.  Presenter is the original product within a series of applications that make up what is now called Adobe Connect (formally Macromedia Breeze), and has literally been out in the market since 2000.

When engaging with customers on the Connect/Breeze product line, I end up spending the majority of my time on our web conferencing or training solutions, basically assuming that people “get” the value proposition of being able to take your huge presentation with animations and such, add voice over, and publish it all together as a rich Flash application on the web.  However, every now and then I run into a customer who isn’t aware of this technology, and am reminded through their reactions of what a great concept this is.  Kudos to Keith and Kevin (Presedia founders) for having the vision back then…