Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to read the latest book by David Coleman – 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration. As the founder and director of Collaborative Strategies, David has been involved in the collaboration world since 1989. He’s a leading analyst, author and public speaker who has consulted with many of the top vendors in the collaboration industry. His blog is a great source for insightful information on current trends. I first met David myself at an Enterprise 2.0 conference back in 2007 and since then he’s provided us with much valuable advice on our own business development.

This is David’s fourth book dealing with collaboration, though his other books have tended to have more of an academic flavor. What I found so effective about this book was the simplicity of the format with which the ideas were presented. Each rule was concisely presented in a page or two. You can read through the book in about an hour or two and take away many valuable insights to help your business. I also liked the way that the book itself was developed as a collaborative undertaking, with over 3/4 of the rules being contributed by people from various fields who relate the collaboration issues they’ve addressed first hand in their organizations. This gives the book a diverse and very practical perspective.

As examples, here are the top 10 rules that I thought were most relevant to our mission with Cozimo:

• Rule 2 – Know Why You Are Collaborating
• Rule 4 – Include All of Your Stakeholders
• Rule 7 – Structured Communications Support Successful Collaboration
• Rule 22 – Accountability Is the Next Step in Collaboration
• Rule 25 – Collaboration Can Make Projects More Successful
• Rule 31 – Collaboration Tools Should Be Easy
• Rule 34 – Communication Improves with Collaboration Technologies
• Rule 38 – Persistence Is Critical
• Rule 39 – Use Visual Technologies for Collaboration
• Rule 40 – It Is Easier to Move Bits than Butts

To get the full story in a fast and easy read,  I would highly recommend picking up a copy of this very insightful and practical book. You can order it online here.

This month we take a more detailed look at one of the more powerful features of Cozimo – the ability to review and annotate video. Cozimo’s system allows any number of remote team members to play and annotate a video from any standard web browser. Members can review videos on their own or you can have online meetings where the playback and annotation are fully synchronized between all participants. To optimize the real-time performance of the system, we recommend that video files posted for review and feedback not be larger than necessary for the type of feedback required (there is a 60 MB per file limit).

Formats and Encoding – Cozimo supports most popular video formats, including QuickTime (.mov), MPEG (.mpg, .mp4), AVI, Windows media (.wmv) and Flash video (.flv). When formats other than .flv are uploaded an .flv proxy is created for the purposes of playback and review. Because the encoding occurs on the fly at upload, there may be a delay between the time that the file uploads and the thumbnail of the file appears in the file tab indicating that it is available for review. This delay is usually a few minutes but it can sometimes take quite a bit longer if the file is large (or the encoding server very busy).

The encoding parameters have been set to preserve the resolution and quality of the original file as much as possible though with any encoding process there can be variations so it’s a good idea to check the result prior to distribution if this can be an issue. You can maintain complete control of the quality by uploading your own .flv files. This way you avoid the encoding delay as well.

Playback  and Annotation – During playback, video files are progressively downloaded to the browser (not streamed). You can start playing the video clip after 20% of the file has downloaded. File download progress is indicated as an orange line in the scrub bar:

Use the buttons or hotkeys to control the playback as shown below:

Click on the label above the controls to toggle between a timecode display or frame count:

Stop on any keyframe to make annotations on it as you would on any image. Frames that have annotations on them are indicated with a blue marker in the timeline. By default, Cozimo inserts a keyframe at every six frames during the encoding process. If you upload your own .flv files you can insert keyframes at any frequency you wish.

To synchronize the playback of the video between multiple collaborators, click on “Presenter Mode”. While in presenter mode you can play the video or scrub to any keyframe and all participants will be synchronized to the same frame. When you stop to annotate all participants can “whiteboard” on the same frame together. If a participant moves off the synchronized playback to view the video independently, the presenter can re-synchronize the participant by pausing and restarting the playback. Any collaborator can click on Presenter Mode at any time to take control of the playback.

This month we caught up with Annie Normandin, a producer with Frame Studio located Montreal, Quebec. FRAME starting using Cozimo less than three months ago and it has quickly become an integral part of their production workflow.

Hi Annie. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Frame Studio.

FRAME is a motion design and VFX studio that produces animated content for all types of applications. We do animated work for commercials.  We do visual animations and broadcast packaging for TV shows or documentaries. We’ve also done a few big projects for live events that used animated projections.

What type of clients do you work with?

We work mainly for ad agencies or production houses. Some ad agencies come directly to us for certain small projects and if it requires a shoot we’ll work with production houses. That’s the nature of the industry – we’re often collaborating with many different companies and freelancers on any given project.

How have you been using Cozimo?

We have two facilities – one located here in Montreal and the other one in Quebec City. So we started off using Cozimo primarily to help us manage our internal production workflow and exchange feedback. It’s a great communication tool for dealing with digital media and pretty much everyone in our company is using it now on a daily basis.

Have you been using Cozimo for client reviews?

More and more. We recently completed a production where we were working with a freelance director who was on assignment in Toronto. We used Cozimo extensively to manage the feedback loop and to hold online production meetings with him and other consultants.

What was the response?

Since we were previously working with FTP and email, it took a bit of an adjustment at first but once we got started people got very excited about it. Being able to watch and work together on a video through a web browser is very cool. In fact, I understand that you’ll be picking up two or three new customers from this experience.

So has Cozimo proven to be a cost effective solution for you?

No question. We’re using Cozimo more and more and the gains in efficiency are immense. It has absolutely made our feedback process faster and it’s also helped  us avoid mistakes because we can communicate and discuss the content visually and interactively. In this economic climate we have to be careful to keep our costs under control and Cozimo has definitely been a big help in that regard.

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An important goal we established when we first started Cozimo was to foster creative collaboration through many different forums. In developing the Cozimo system, we specifically designed it in an a modular fashion so that we could readily deploy and offer our real-time Image Collaboration Environment (what we call “ICE”) not just through our own applications, but also through the many different products, websites and services that could benefit from it.  Last year we worked with CGarchitect to enhance their showcase galleries with collaborative capabilities. Later in the year we introduce our WordPress plugin for integrating a collaborative image or video as part of a blog. And most recently we introduced our “Collaborate Now” tool and Firefox extension that allows people to instantly capture any web page and collaborate on it.

Over the past few months we’ve completed some significant upgrades to our backend collaboration server as well as enhancing our API so that we now have even greater functionality and flexibility to support these type of collaborative projects.  In the coming months you’ll be hearing more about a number of partnerships we’ve recently undertaken as well as new product options that will make this API available to individual companies wishing to enhance their existing CMS or intra/extranet.   If you have a specific project that you would like to pursue (commercial, educational or cultural), please feel free to contact us to discuss it. This is the type of collaboration we enjoy most!

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.