Comments on: An Elegant Option for Collaborative Content Review

By: remote control software

remote control software — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:22:16 +0000

I have used Cozimo to collaborate on PPT presentations with members from my consulting who are at client sites. It provides a way for me to monitor what they are doing and offer some suggestions. It is much more convenient than exchanging emails, since interactions occur in real time.

By: Joe Fritz

Joe Fritz — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:22:54 +0000

Thanks for the recommendation of Cozimo. (I know this comment is months old). After trying out 5 or 6 of these types of applications, Cozimo wins out by being the cleanest, not requiring Silverlight (the devs at work ALL refused to install it, nulling Colaab as an option… otherwise that might have been the winner), allowing for multi-user sharing, live updates, multi-page documents, and a very clean UI. The one thing I wish it did have was a list view of all of the comments made on a single file. But I can get around that by printing out a file for now. I’ll put in a feature request when we upgrade to a paid account.

Thanks again!

By: TCS Weekly – Episode 2 is live - AdamKinney.com

TCS Weekly – Episode 2 is live - AdamKinney.com — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:08:02 +0000

[...] Colaab, Silverlight-based collaborative content review application [...]

By: Will C.

Will C. — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:26:51 +0000

This discussion on moral norms brings home the need for more collabrative contact on the web. It is so easy, being insullated behind text driven chat with all it’s slang and abbreviations, to asume we all think alike and share the same morals, except for “the other people”, of course. :)
A collabrative environment forces us to accept the fact that there are many shades of grey in the real world, where rarely is anything black and white.

By: KRM

KRM — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:12:04 +0000

It’s a little dated at this point, but I’ll give my impressions.

I signed up yesterday to play around with it, downloaded Silverlight, went through the signup process. There’s been enough commentary on requiring Silverlight, but my only issue is that I can’t expect clients to download and install it, so that makes it a non-starter. Still, I was willing to try things out.

Logged in, created a workspace and was ready to paste in some text as my first resource. Full stop – you can’t enter text as a resource. You have to upload something.

So, I saved my stuff into a text PDF file and uploaded it. It sat there and sat there and sat there. Never gave a confirmation. I canceled the upload and started again. Same thing. Then I go back to my workspace and there are both of the resources, processing. So far as I know they’re still processing, because I gave up waiting and later they seemed to disappear.

I think it’s admirable anytime anyone puts out a new and cool application and of course they don’t work great at first and of course there are always issues and OF COURSE the first thing web nerds do is pile on and take a dump on anything they can find (criticism being the national sport of the internet), but I have to say that this one really is tough to give a fair shot to.

In fact, just from what I’ve seen, I would advise against even trying it in its current state. Maybe several revisions down the road.

By: Kev

Kev — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:19:00 +0000

@bob

You say “I’m sorry that Silverlight isn’t for you” but you conveniently avoid the fact that I CAN’T install Siverlight on my MacOS.

You talk about this app being for design review, but you cannot be serious if you can’t deliver a solution that works with Macs.

By: ProofHQ - collaborating on design signoff

ProofHQ - collaborating on design signoff — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:38:36 +0000

[...] the signoff of deliverables in a design project. Pamela covered similar tools earlier in the year (An Elegant Option for Collaborative Content Review) and ProofHQ looks like it’ll be competitive with [...]

By: Web Work 101: 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without « mensonblog

Web Work 101: 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without « mensonblog — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:16:29 +0000

[...] Colaab [...]

By: WebWorkerDaily » Archive Web Work 101: 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without «

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:03:27 +0000

[...] Colaab [...]

By: Pamela Poole

Pamela Poole — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:34:43 +0000

Hi Brian. I appreciate your taking the time to give me the view from the other side! I’m reassured. :-)

By: Brian Carnell

Brian Carnell — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:22:21 +0000

Pam,

Yes I think, say a Calvin Klein style male image would also be problematic.

I’m trying to get business done, and frankly I wouldn’t be comfortable sending an e-mail to my colleagues asking them to give this demo a try with content like that.

Especially given the service. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an image like that, say, if I was sending people possible stock photo sites that we might want to use. But document collaboration? Come on.

It just comes across as extremely unprofessional.

By: Pamela Poole

Pamela Poole — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:39:13 +0000

Hi Brian. I hesitated to include that. I’m not militant or a prude. But there’s a time and a place! It’s all about context. I’m really curious to know if an equally suggestive picture of a guy would have bothered any guys.

By: Brian Carnell

Brian Carnell — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:11:11 +0000

Pam — nice one on the final screenshot. Apparently, though, the Intertubes only get upset about such things if they involve Motrin. Still unbelievable a company would go live with that as part of their introductory demo.

By: Bob Thomson

Bob Thomson — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:59:41 +0000

@Vincent – I’m sorry that Silverlight isn’t for you. For us it enabled building out a richer user experience while staying within the browser.

@Alex – As you suggest tools like colaab can be used for both:

Collaborative content review / production, for example liaising with a design agency about a logo they are producing for you.

Collaborative content consumption, for example guiding people through a fire safety video or slideshow.

With colaab we’ve worked very hard on making updates made by others appear as close to real-time as possible for everyone else, be it the addition of comments to a Powerpoint or some annotations at 1 min 26 seconds of a video!

Thanks,

Bob

–
Bob Thomson
storm ideas

http://blog.stormideas.com
http://colaab.com
twitter: movingforwards

By: Alex Renaud

Alex Renaud — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:42:20 +0000

These types of collaboration tools are incredibly useful. We have been using them for training and consulting. We’ve benn using Cozimo (not Collab) for the past year and we love it. The best things is that people can either review content on their own or together in live real-time meetings. I believe that Octopz also supports synchronous collaboration but I don’t believe the others you mention do.

By: Vincent

Vincent — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:19:13 +0000

What *I* find offensive, is silverlight. I’ll take a pleasant looking model over anything coded in silverlight. Then again, I don’t live in Iran or Saudi Arabia or the USA. YMMV.