A new customer was recently asking about how to make Cozimo as easy as possible for their clients to use. Here are a few recommendations:

1. Use messaging. The integrated messaging system is one of the more powerful features of Cozimo. When you post content that you want reviewed, the easiest way to direct your clients to the content is to use “Post Message”. The client will receive an email with a link that will take them directly to the item in the collaboration workspace. If you want your clients to review a series of items then send a message from the first item in the folder with instructions that they should go through all the items posted, navigation between items is easy with the next and previous arrows.

2. Create the client accounts for them. There are two ways to add a new client to a workgroup. One way is to send them an invitation. If they don’t already have a Cozimo account they will have to create one at the time they accept your invitation. You can streamline this process by creating an account for your client when you add them to the workgroup. They will receive an email with their login information and a link that takes them directly to your login page.

3. Give them an introduction. The first time you use Cozimo with a client, it’s always a good idea to get on the phone and take them through their first experience with the service. Post an image or video and show them how to navigate to it and use the annotation tools. It can make a big difference in their attitude towards using the tool if you help them get started on the right foot.

Since our shows in May, I’ve been helping a number of new customers implement Cozimo within larger organizations. While each company has had its own particular issues to deal with, I thought I’d list some of the recommendations I find myself making most often:

Account Setup – Most businesses opt to start out with our “Plus” plan that includes a customized “branded” login page and unique URL. This URL can be used in your web page as a private “client login” extranet (for an example see www.tangram3ds.com – “Client Area”). The URL is http://username.cozimo.com, so I recommend using your web or email domain name as the username of your Cozimo company account. People in your organization, however, can use whatever usernames you or they choose.

Cozimo Administrator – It’s a good idea to designate only one or two people to be in charge of administering the company account and setting up workgroups. When a new project comes online, the administrator creates the required workgroup and adds the project staff members. Those staff members can then take over the day-to-day maintenance – adding new people and folders throughout the course of the project.

Adding Workgroup Members – There are two ways: you can send them invitations and let them set up their own accounts, or you can set up the accounts for them. Most people find the latter approach easier – especially when dealing with external clients. In any event, you should let people know in advance of your intention to use Cozimo and follow up to make sure their invitation or new account emails don’t get filtered out as spam.

New workgroup members are automatically placed into a contact list for the company account so adding them to subsequent workgroups takes just a few clicks.

Pilot Project – To give you the chance to explore the full functionality of Cozimo and to learn how it can best integrate with your general project workflow, I recommend starting out with a single pilot project. Once you get this project underway and feel comfortable with the process, it will be much easier to roll it out on a wider scale (and if experience is any indication, once people see it in action, that won’t take long).

Stay in Touch – As I mentioned above, every company has their own particular issues to deal with and we want to make sure that you get the most out of Cozimo. So please feel free to contact us regarding any questions you have. We’re happy to help you get started and we’re always interested to hear new ideas that can make Cozimo even better for you as we move forward.

It’s interesting how many of the people we speak with about Cozimo start out by asking how we differ from a web conferencing application like Webex. Understandably, the idea that you can make a presentation online to a group of people with both applications sparks the comparison. But in reality the two applications are completely different beasts and it’s important to understand these differences when considering your collaboration requirements:

Broadcast Quality vs. High Quality

When web conferencing “broadcasts” a video screen capture of the presenter’s computer, there is typically a high degree of image compression required to optimize bandwidth. As a result the quality and resolution of the work you’re presenting can be severely degraded and there can be significant latency in presenting dynamic content such as video. With Cozimo everyone works directly from the content itself so you see the full resolution and quality of the media. PDF files maintain all vector information so that people can zoom into graphics and text without degradation. Videos are played back fully synchronized with frame accurate timing. The visual quality of the work is naturally of utmost importance for creative professionals and Cozimo provides presentation and online collaboration without having to compromise.

“Here and Now” vs. “Anytime, Anywhere”

Web conferencing is all about the “here and now”. It’s sufficient for collaborating on content as long as everyone is together in a session but once the session is over that’s it. With Cozimo you have the option to let people review and annotate your content at their convenience so you can review it at a later time. Or you can be online together with any number of team members for real-time review sessions. In addition, web-conferencing solutions often require the installation of specialized software that is not always supported on all platforms while Cozimo can be administered and accessed pretty much any web browser on any OS.

Persistence and Tracking

The annotations and drawings that are made during a web conference are not persistent so it’s hard for any team member to return and review any comments that were made. While it’s usually possible to record a video of a web-conference session, you can imagine how difficult it would be to go back and locate some specific comment or note at some future date. With Cozimo all the comments, drawings and messages are persistent and you can easily reference them at any time. In addition, you have a complete history available of the review activity for any item.

In the end, it really boils down to process. Today, people use a wide variety of means for distributing and collaborating on digital content: email, FTP, web conferencing, faxes, couriers, live meetings, etc. Using all these tools typically result in disjointed feedback and an awful lot of wasted time trying to keep it all circulating and organized. The real value of Cozimo is that, unlike the immediacy of a web conference, it provides a fully integrated suite of tools for supporting digital content review and collaboration throughout an ongoing design or production process.

Today we are happy to announce the public beta release of our latest collaborative experiment: a Cozimo WordPress plugin! That’s right – now rather than just displaying an image or a video as a static participant in your blog posts, you can use the plugin to enable a dynamic media experience where readers can chat, draw and comment directly on your images and videos. You can even use the plugin to collaborate in real-time with others and to synchronize the playback of a video so that everyone is watching the same frame at the same time.

We hope this functionality will open new opportunities for how blogs can be used in professional, educational, creative or just plain fun applications. Try it out for yourself! The beta plugin is available free of charge for installed versions of WordPress.org. You can get all the information you need to download and install it here.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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.”