During his keynote address for Enterprise 2.0 last June, Andrew McAffee, a professor at Harvard made the interesting observation that “Email is virtually everyone’s current endowment of collaboration software.” Email, of course, was originally designed for sending and receiving messages and for that common task it’s an unprecedented success. Today, over 90% of Internet users use email. And with email so ubiquitous – especially in business - it’s easy to understand why we try wrangle it into doing tasks that it was not really designed to support – including review and collaboration. But as the Google Docs video above so nicely illustrates, when it comes to working on content together with a team, email alone can have a lot of drawbacks:

• Sending attachments makes it difficult to track versions over time and ensure that everyone is always working with the latest content.
• Email does not let you hold a conversation with more than one person at a time.
• Email does not provide a convenient record. Any markups made on visual content like images and video cannot be searched for from an email.
• Email is not generally integrated with project content.

Today project managers have a wide variety of communication tools to take advantage of in running a project (email, IM, VoIP) and all have their role to play in a collaborative workflow. The challenge arises in trying to coordinate and track communication as it relates to the content being developed. Google Docs represents a new apprach to the problem by integrating documents with various modes of communication from one easily-accessible web-based service. Cozimo takes the approach further for creative and design professionals by supporting rich media content like images, video and PDF files and letting you collaborate together with your team directly on the content itself when the needs arises. Old habits die hard, but as one of our customers so aptly put it “until you start using it (Cozimo) on a project it’s hard to appreciate just how much smarter the approach really is.”