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  • Creating farms of unique websites

    13 avril 2011, par

    MediaSPIP platforms can be installed as a farm, with a single "core" hosted on a dedicated server and used by multiple websites.
    This allows (among other things) : implementation costs to be shared between several different projects / individuals rapid deployment of multiple unique sites creation of groups of like-minded sites, making it possible to browse media in a more controlled and selective environment than the major "open" (...)

  • Les autorisations surchargées par les plugins

    27 avril 2010, par

    Mediaspip core
    autoriser_auteur_modifier() afin que les visiteurs soient capables de modifier leurs informations sur la page d’auteurs

  • Gestion des droits de création et d’édition des objets

    8 février 2011, par

    Par défaut, beaucoup de fonctionnalités sont limitées aux administrateurs mais restent configurables indépendamment pour modifier leur statut minimal d’utilisation notamment : la rédaction de contenus sur le site modifiables dans la gestion des templates de formulaires ; l’ajout de notes aux articles ; l’ajout de légendes et d’annotations sur les images ;

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  • 5 Top Google Optimize Alternatives to Consider

    17 mars 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips

    Google Optimize is a popular conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool from Alphabet (parent company of Google). With it, you can run A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests to figure out which web page designs perform best. 

    Google Optimize seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics (GA). It also has a free tier. So many marketers chose it as their default A/B testing tool…until recently. 

    Google will sunset Google Optimize by 30 September 2023

    Starting from this date, Google will no longer support Optimize and Optimize 360 (premium edition). All experiments, active after this date, will be paused automatically and you’ll no longer have access to your historical records (unless these are exported in advance).

    The better news is that you still have time to find a Google Optimize alternative — and this post will help you with that. 

    Disclaimer : Please note that the information provided in this blog post is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to provide legal advice. Every situation is unique and requires a specific legal analysis. If you have any questions regarding the legal implications of any matter, please consult with your legal team or seek advice from a qualified legal professional. 

    Best Google Optimize Alternatives 

    Google Optimize was among the first free A/B testing apps. But as with any product, it has some disadvantages. 

    Data updates happen every 24 hours, not in real-time. A free account has caps on the number of experiments. You cannot run more than 5 experiments at a time or implement over 16 combinations for multivariate testing (MVT). A premium version (Optimize 365) has fewer usage constraints, but it costs north of $150K per year. 

    Google Optimize has native integration with GA (of course), so you can review all the CRO data without switching apps. But Optimize doesn’t work well with Google Analytics alternatives, which many choose to use for privacy-friendly user tracking, higher data accuracy and GDPR compliance. 

    At the same time, many other conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools have emerged, often boasting better accuracy and more competitive features than Google Optimize.

    Here are 5 alternative A/B testing apps worth considering.

    Adobe Target 

    Adobe Target Homepage

    Adobe Target is an advanced personalization platform for optimising user and marketing experiences on digital properties. It uses machine learning algorithms to deliver dynamic content, personalised promotions and custom browsing experiences to visitors based on their behaviour and demographic data. 

    Adobe Target also provides A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT) capabilities to help marketers test and refine their digital experiences.

    Key features : 

    • Visual experience builder for A/B tests setup and replication 
    • Full factorial multivariate tests and multi-armed bandit testing
    • Omnichannel personalisation across web properties 
    • Multiple audience segmentation and targeting options 
    • Personalised content, media and product recommendations 
    • Advanced customer intelligence (in conjunction with other Adobe products)

    Pros

    • Convenient A/B test design tool 
    • Acucate MVT and MAB results 
    • Powerful segmentation capabilities 
    • Access to extra behavioural analytics 
    • One-click personalisation activation 
    • Supports rules-based, location-based and contextual personalisation
    • Robust omnichannel analytics in conjunction with other Adobe products 

    Cons 

    • Requires an Adobe Marketing Cloud subscription 
    • No free trial or freemium tier 
    • More complex product setup and configuration 
    • Steep learning curve for new users 

    Price : On-demand. 

    Adobe Target is sold as part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Licence costs vary, based on selected subscriptions and the number of users, but are typically above $10K.

    Google Optimize vs Adobe Target : The Verdict 

    Google Optimize comes with a free tier, unlike Adobe Target. It provides you with a basic builder for A/B and MVT tests, but none of the personalisation tools Adobe has. Because of ease-of-use and low price, other Google Optimize alternatives are better suited for small to medium-sized businesses, doing baseline CRO for funnel optimisation. 

    Adobe Target pulls you into the vast Adobe marketing ecosystem, offering omnipotent customer behaviour analytics, machine-learning-driven website optimisation, dynamic content recommendations, product personalisation and extensive reporting. The app is better suited for larger enterprises with a significant investment in digital marketing.

    Matomo A/B Testing

    Matomo A/B testing page

    Matomo A/B Testing is a CRO tool, integrated into Matomo. All Matomo Cloud users get instant access to it, while On-Premise (free) Matomo users can purchase A/B testing as a plugin

    With Matomo A/B Testing, you can create multiple variations of a web or mobile page and test them with different segments of their audience. Matomo also doesn’t have any strict experiment caps, unlike Google Optimize. 

    You can split-test multiple creative variants for on-site assets such as buttons, slogans, titles, call-to-actions, image positions and more. You can even benchmark the performance of two (or more !) completely different homepage designs, for instance. 

    With us, you can compliantly and ethically collect historical user data about any visitor, who’s entered any of the active tests — and monitor their entire customer journey. You can also leverage Matomo A/B Testing data as part of multi-touch attribution modelling to determine which channels bring the best leads and which assets drive them towards conversion. 

     

    Since Matomo A/B Testing is part of our analytics platform, it works well with other features such as goal tracking, heatmaps, user session recordings and more. 

    Key features

    • Run experiments for web, mobile, email and digital campaigns 
    • Convenient A/B test design interface 
    • One-click experiment scheduling 
    • Integration with historic visitor profiles
    • Near real-time conversion tracking 
    • Apply segmentation to Matomo reports 
    • Easy creative variation sharing via a URL 

    Pros

    • High data accuracy with no reporting gaps 
    • Monitor the evolution of your success metrics for each variation
    • Embed experiments across multiple digital channels 
    • Set a custom confidence threshold for winning variations 
    • No compromises on user privacy 
    • Free 21-day trial available (for Matomo Cloud) and free 30-day plugin trial (for Matomo On-Premise)

    Cons

    • No on-site personalisation tools available 
    • Configuration requires some coding experience 

    Price : Matomo A/B Testing is included in the monthly Cloud plan (starting at €19 per month). On-Premise users can buy this functionality as a plugin (starting at €199/year). 

    Google Optimize vs Matomo A/B Testing : The Verdict 

    Matomo offers the same types of A/B testing features as Google Optimize (and some extras !), but without any usage caps. Unlike Matomo, Google Optimize doesn’t support A/B tests for mobile apps. You can access some content testing features for Android Apps via Firebase, but this requires another subscription. 

    Matomo lets you run A/B experiments across the web and mobile properties, plus desktop apps, email campaigns and digital ads. Also, Matomo has higher conversion data accuracy, thanks to our privacy-focused method for collecting website analytics

    When using Matomo in most EU markets, you’re legally exempt from showing a cookie consent banner. Meaning you can collect richer insights for each experiment and make data-driven decisions. Nearly 40% of global consumers reject cookie consent banners. With most other tools, you won’t be getting the full picture of your traffic. 

    Optimizely 

    Optimizely homepage

    Optimizely is a conversion optimization platform that offers several competitive products for a separate subscription. These include a flexible content management system (CMS), a content marketing platform, a web A/B testing app, a mobile featuring testing product and two eCommerce-specific website management products.

    The Web Experimentation app allows you to optimise every customer touchpoint by scheduling unlimited split or multi-variant tests and conversions across all your projects from the same app. Apart from websites, this subscription also supports experiments for single-page applications. But if you want more advanced mobile app testing features, you’ll have to purchase another product — Feature Experimentation. 

    Key features :

    • Intuitive experiment design tool 
    • Cross-browser testing and experiment preview 
    • Multi-page funnel tests design 
    • Behavioural and geo-targeting 
    • Exit/bounce rate tracking
    • Custom audience builder for experiments
    • Comprehensive reporting 

    Pros

    • Unlimited number of concurrent experiments 
    • Upload your audience data for test optimisation 
    • Dynamic content personalisation available on a higher tier 
    • Pre-made integrations with popular heatmap and analytics tools 
    • Supports segmentation by device, campaign type, traffic sources or referrer 

    Cons

    • You need a separate subscription for mobile CRO 
    • Free trial not available, pricing on-demand 
    • Multiple licences and subscriptions may be required 
    • Doesn’t support A/B tests for emails 

    Price : Available on-demand. 

    Web Experimentation tool has three subscription tiers — Grow, Accelerate, and Scale with different features included. 

    Google Optimize vs Optimizely : The Verdict 

    Optimizely is a strong contender for Google Optimize alternative as it offers more advanced audience targeting and segmentation options. You can target users by IP address, cookies, traffic sources, device type, browser, language, location or a custom utm_campaign parameter.

    Similar to Matomo A/B testing, Optimizely doesn’t limit the number of projects or concurrent experiments you can do. But you have to immediately sign an annual contract (no monthly plans are available). Pricing also varies based on the number of processed impressions (more experiments = a higher annual bill). An annual licence can cost $63,700 for 10 million impressions on average, according to an independent estimate. 

    Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) 

    VWO is another popular experimentation platform, supporting web, mobile and server-side A/B testing and personalisation campaigns.

    Similar to others, VWO offers a drag-and-drop visual editor for creating campaign variants. You don’t need design or coding knowledge to create tests. Once you’re all set, the app will benchmark your experiment performance against expected conversion rates, report on differences in conversion rate and point towards the best-performing creative. 

    Similar to Optimizely, VWO also offers web/mobile app optimisation as a separate subscription. Apart from testing visual page elements, you can also run in-app experiments throughout the product stack to locate new revenue opportunities. For example, you can test in-app subscription flows, search algorithms or navigation flows to improve product UX. 

    Key features :

    • Multivariate and multi-arm bandit tests 
    • Multi-step (funnel) split tests 
    • Collaborative experiment tracking dashboard 
    • Target users by different attributes (URL, device, geo-data) 
    • Personal library of creative elements 
    • Funnel analytics, session records, and heatmaps available 

    Pros

    • Free starter plan is available (similar to Google Optimize)
    • Simple tracking code installation and easy code editor
    • Offers online reporting dashboards and report downloads 
    • Slice-and-dice reports by different audience dimensions
    • No impact on website/app loading speed and performance 

    Cons

    • Multivariate testing is only available on a higher-tier plan 
    • Annual contract required, despite monthly billing 
    • Mobile app A/B split tests require another licence 
    • Requires ongoing user training 

    Price : Free limited plan available. 

    Then from $356/month, billed annually. 

    Google Optimize vs VWO : The Verdict 

    The free plan on VWO is very similar to Google Optimize. You get access to A/B testing and split URL testing features for websites only. The visual editing tool is relatively simple — and you can use URL or device targeting. 

    Free VWO reports, however, lack the advertised depth in terms of behavioural or funnel-based reporting. In-depth insights are available only to premium users. Extra advertised features like heatmaps, form analytics and session recordings require yet another subscription. With Matomo Cloud, you get all three of these together with A/B testing. 

    ConvertFlow 

    ConvertFlow Homepage

    ConvertFlow markets itself as a funnel optimisation app for eCommerce and SaaS companies. It meshes lead generation tools with some CRO workflows. 

    With ConvertFlow, you can effortlessly design opt-in forms, pop-ups, quizzes and even entire landing pages using pre-made web elements and a visual builder. Afterwards, you can put all of these assets to a “field test” via the ConvertFlow CRO platform. Select among pre-made templates or create custom variants for split or multivariate testing. You can customise tests based on URLs, cookie data and user geolocation among other factors. 

    Similar to Adobe Target, ConvertFlow also allows you to run tests targeted at specific customer segments in your CRM. The app has native integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce, so this feature is easy to enable. ConvertFlow also offers advanced targeting and segmentation options, based on user on-site behaviour, demographics data or known interests.

    Key features :

    • Create and test landing pages, surveys, quizzes, pop-ups, surveys and other lead-gen assets. 
    • All-in-one funnel builder for creating demand-generation campaigns 
    • Campaign personalisation, based on on-site activity 
    • Re-usable dynamic visitor segments for targeting 
    • Multi-step funnel design and customisation 
    • Embedded forms for split testing CTAs on existing pages 

    Pros

    • Allows controlling the traffic split for each variant to get objective results 
    • Pre-made integration with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager 
    • Conversion and funnel reports, available for each variant 
    • Access to a library with 300+ conversion campaign templates
    • Apply progressive visitor profiling to dynamically adjust user experiences 

    Cons

    • Each plan covers only $10K views. Each extra 10k costs another $20/mo 
    • Only one website allowed per account (except for Teams plan) 
    • Doesn’t support experiments in mobile app 
    • Not all CRO features are available on a Pro plan. 

    Price : Access to CRO features costs from $300/month on a Pro plan. Subscription costs also increase, based on the total number of monthly views. 

    Google Optimize vs CovertFlow : The Verdict 

    ConvertFlow is equally convenient to use in conjunction with Google Analytics as Google Optimize is. But the similarities end up here since ConvertFlow combines funnel design features with CRO tools. 

    With ConvertFlow, you can run more advanced experiments and apply more targeting criteria than with Google Optimize. You can observe user behaviour and conversion rates across multi-step CTA forms and page funnels, plus benefit from first-touch attribution reporting without switching apps. 

    Though CovertFlow has a free plan, it doesn’t include access to CRO features. Meaning it’s not a free alternative to Google Optimize.

    Comparison of the Top 5 Google Optimize Alternatives

    FeatureGoogle OptimizeAdobe TargetMatomo A/B testOptimizely VWOConvertFlow

    Supported channelsWebWeb, mobile, social media, email Web, mobile, email, digital campaignsWebsites & mobile appsWebsites, web and mobile appsWebsites and mobile apps
    A/B testingcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark icon
    Easy GA integration check mark iconXcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark icon
    Integrations with other web analytics appsXXcheck mark iconcheck mark iconXcheck mark icon
    Audience segmentationBasicAdvancedAdvancedAdvancedAdvancedAdvanced
    Geo-targetingcheck mark iconcheck mark iconXcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark icon
    Behavioural targetingBasicAdvancedAdvancedAdvancedAdvancedAdvanced
    HeatmapsXXcheck mark icon

    No extra cost with Matomo Cloud
    〰️

    *via integrations
    〰️

    *requires another subscription
    X
    Session recordingsXXcheck mark icon

    No extra cost with Matomo Cloud
    X〰️

    *requires another subscription
    X
    Multivariate testing (MVT)check mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark iconcheck mark icon
    Dynamic personalisation Xcheck mark iconXcheck mark icon〰️

    *only on higher account tiers
    〰️

    *only on the highest account tiers
    Product recommendationsXcheck mark iconX〰️

    *requires another subscription
    〰️

    *requires another subscription
    check mark icon
    SupportSelf-help desk on a free tierEmail, live-chat, phone supportEmail, self-help guides and user forumKnowledge base, online tickets, user communitySelf-help guides, email, phoneKnowledge base, email, and live chat support
    PriceFreemiumOn-demandFrom €19 for Cloud subscription

    From €199/year as plugin for On-Premise
    On-demandFreemium

    From $365/mo
    From $300/month

    Conclusion 

    Google Optimize has served marketers well for over five years. But as the company decided to move on — so should you. 

    Oher A/B testing tools like Matomo, Optimizely or VWO offer better funnel analytics and split testing capabilities without any usage caps. Also, tools like Adobe Target, Optimizely, and VWO offer advanced content personalisation, based on aggregate analytics. However, they also come with much higher subscription costs.

    Matomo is a robust, compliant and cost-effective alternative to Google Optimize. Our tool allows you to schedule campaigns across all digital mediums (and even desktop apps !) without a

  • My journey to Coviu

    27 octobre 2015, par silvia

    My new startup just released our MVP – this is the story of what got me here.

    I love creating new applications that let people do their work better or in a manner that wasn’t possible before.

    German building and loan socityMy first such passion was as a student intern when I built a system for a building and loan association’s monthly customer magazine. The group I worked with was managing their advertiser contacts through a set of paper cards and I wrote a dBase based system (yes, that long ago) that would manage their customer relationships. They loved it – until it got replaced by an SAP system that cost 100 times what I cost them, had really poor UX, and only gave them half the functionality. It was a corporate system with ongoing support, which made all the difference to them.

    Dr Scholz und Partner GmbHThe story repeated itself with a CRM for my Uncle’s construction company, and with a resume and quotation management system for Accenture right after Uni, both of which I left behind when I decided to go into research.

    Even as a PhD student, I never lost sight of challenges that people were facing and wanted to develop technology to overcome problems. The aim of my PhD thesis was to prepare for the oncoming onslaught of audio and video on the Internet (yes, this was 1994 !) by developing algorithms to automatically extract and locate information in such files, which would enable users to structure, index and search such content.

    Many of the use cases that we explored are now part of products or continue to be challenges : finding music that matches your preferences, identifying music or video pieces e.g. to count ads on the radio or to mark copyright infringement, or the automated creation of video summaries such as trailers.

    CSIRO

    This continued when I joined the CSIRO in Australia – I was working on segmenting speech into words or talk spurts since that would simplify captioning & subtitling, and on MPEG-7 which was a (slightly over-engineered) standard to structure metadata about audio and video.

    In 2001 I had the idea of replicating the Web for videos : i.e. creating hyperlinked and searchable video-only experiences. We called it “Annodex” for annotated and indexed video and it needed full-screen hyperlinked video in browsers – man were we ahead of our time ! It was my first step into standards, got several IETF RFCs to my name, and started my involvement with open codecs through Xiph.

    vquence logoAround the time that YouTube was founded in 2006, I founded Vquence – originally a video search company for the Web, but pivoted to a video metadata mining company. Vquence still exists and continues to sell its data to channel partners, but it lacks the user impact that has always driven my work.

    As the video element started being developed for HTML5, I had to get involved. I contributed many use cases to the W3C, became a co-editor of the HTML5 spec and focused on video captioning with WebVTT while contracting to Mozilla and later to Google. We made huge progress and today the technology exists to publish video on the Web with captions, making the Web more inclusive for everybody. I contributed code to YouTube and Google Chrome, but was keen to make a bigger impact again.

    NICTA logoThe opportunity came when a couple of former CSIRO colleagues who now worked for NICTA approached me to get me interested in addressing new use cases for video conferencing in the context of WebRTC. We worked on a kiosk-style solution to service delivery for large service organisations, particularly targeting government. The emerging WebRTC standard posed many technical challenges that we addressed by building rtc.io , by contributing to the standards, and registering bugs on the browsers.

    Fast-forward through the development of a few further custom solutions for customers in health and education and we are starting to see patterns of need emerge. The core learning that we’ve come away with is that to get things done, you have to go beyond “talking heads” in a video call. It’s not just about seeing the other person, but much more about having a shared view of the things that need to be worked on and a shared way of interacting with them. Also, we learnt that the things that are being worked on are quite varied and may include multiple input cameras, digital documents, Web pages, applications, device data, controls, forms.

    Coviu logoSo we set out to build a solution that would enable productive remote collaboration to take place. It would need to provide an excellent user experience, it would need to be simple to work with, provide for the standard use cases out of the box, yet be architected to be extensible for specialised data sharing needs that we knew some of our customers had. It would need to be usable directly on Coviu.com, but also able to integrate with specialised applications that some of our customers were already using, such as the applications that they spend most of their time in (CRMs, practice management systems, learning management systems, team chat systems). It would need to require our customers to sign up, yet their clients to join a call without sign-up.

    Collaboration is a big problem. People are continuing to get more comfortable with technology and are less and less inclined to travel distances just to get a service done. In a country as large as Australia, where 12% of the population lives in rural and remote areas, people may not even be able to travel distances, particularly to receive or provide recurring or specialised services, or to achieve work/life balance. To make the world a global village, we need to be able to work together better remotely.

    The need for collaboration is being recognised by specialised Web applications already, such as the LiveShare feature of Invision for Designers, Codassium for pair programming, or the recently announced Dropbox Paper. Few go all the way to video – WebRTC is still regarded as a complicated feature to support.

    Coviu in action

    With Coviu, we’d like to offer a collaboration feature to every Web app. We now have a Web app that provides a modern and beautifully designed collaboration interface. To enable other Web apps to integrate it, we are now developing an API. Integration may entail customisation of the data sharing part of Coviu – something Coviu has been designed for. How to replicate the data and keep it consistent when people collaborate remotely – that is where Coviu makes a difference.

    We have started our journey and have just launched free signup to the Coviu base product, which allows individuals to own their own “room” (i.e. a fixed URL) in which to collaborate with others. A huge shout out goes to everyone in the Coviu team – a pretty amazing group of people – who have turned the app from an idea to reality. You are all awesome !

    With Coviu you can share and annotate :

    • images (show your mum photos of your last holidays, or get feedback on an architecture diagram from a customer),
    • pdf files (give a presentation remotely, or walk a customer through a contract),
    • whiteboards (brainstorm with a colleague), and
    • share an application window (watch a YouTube video together, or work through your task list with your colleagues).

    All of these are regarded as “shared documents” in Coviu and thus have zooming and annotations features and are listed in a document tray for ease of navigation.

    This is just the beginning of how we want to make working together online more productive. Give it a go and let us know what you think.

    http://coviu.com/

    The post My journey to Coviu first appeared on ginger’s thoughts.

  • My journey to Coviu

    27 octobre 2015, par silvia

    My new startup just released our MVP – this is the story of what got me here.

    I love creating new applications that let people do their work better or in a manner that wasn’t possible before.

    German building and loan socityMy first such passion was as a student intern when I built a system for a building and loan association’s monthly customer magazine. The group I worked with was managing their advertiser contacts through a set of paper cards and I wrote a dBase based system (yes, that long ago) that would manage their customer relationships. They loved it – until it got replaced by an SAP system that cost 100 times what I cost them, had really poor UX, and only gave them half the functionality. It was a corporate system with ongoing support, which made all the difference to them.

    Dr Scholz und Partner GmbHThe story repeated itself with a CRM for my Uncle’s construction company, and with a resume and quotation management system for Accenture right after Uni, both of which I left behind when I decided to go into research.

    Even as a PhD student, I never lost sight of challenges that people were facing and wanted to develop technology to overcome problems. The aim of my PhD thesis was to prepare for the oncoming onslaught of audio and video on the Internet (yes, this was 1994 !) by developing algorithms to automatically extract and locate information in such files, which would enable users to structure, index and search such content.

    Many of the use cases that we explored are now part of products or continue to be challenges : finding music that matches your preferences, identifying music or video pieces e.g. to count ads on the radio or to mark copyright infringement, or the automated creation of video summaries such as trailers.

    CSIRO

    This continued when I joined the CSIRO in Australia – I was working on segmenting speech into words or talk spurts since that would simplify captioning & subtitling, and on MPEG-7 which was a (slightly over-engineered) standard to structure metadata about audio and video.

    In 2001 I had the idea of replicating the Web for videos : i.e. creating hyperlinked and searchable video-only experiences. We called it “Annodex” for annotated and indexed video and it needed full-screen hyperlinked video in browsers – man were we ahead of our time ! It was my first step into standards, got several IETF RFCs to my name, and started my involvement with open codecs through Xiph.

    vquence logoAround the time that YouTube was founded in 2006, I founded Vquence – originally a video search company for the Web, but pivoted to a video metadata mining company. Vquence still exists and continues to sell its data to channel partners, but it lacks the user impact that has always driven my work.

    As the video element started being developed for HTML5, I had to get involved. I contributed many use cases to the W3C, became a co-editor of the HTML5 spec and focused on video captioning with WebVTT while contracting to Mozilla and later to Google. We made huge progress and today the technology exists to publish video on the Web with captions, making the Web more inclusive for everybody. I contributed code to YouTube and Google Chrome, but was keen to make a bigger impact again.

    NICTA logoThe opportunity came when a couple of former CSIRO colleagues who now worked for NICTA approached me to get me interested in addressing new use cases for video conferencing in the context of WebRTC. We worked on a kiosk-style solution to service delivery for large service organisations, particularly targeting government. The emerging WebRTC standard posed many technical challenges that we addressed by building rtc.io , by contributing to the standards, and registering bugs on the browsers.

    Fast-forward through the development of a few further custom solutions for customers in health and education and we are starting to see patterns of need emerge. The core learning that we’ve come away with is that to get things done, you have to go beyond “talking heads” in a video call. It’s not just about seeing the other person, but much more about having a shared view of the things that need to be worked on and a shared way of interacting with them. Also, we learnt that the things that are being worked on are quite varied and may include multiple input cameras, digital documents, Web pages, applications, device data, controls, forms.

    Coviu logoSo we set out to build a solution that would enable productive remote collaboration to take place. It would need to provide an excellent user experience, it would need to be simple to work with, provide for the standard use cases out of the box, yet be architected to be extensible for specialised data sharing needs that we knew some of our customers had. It would need to be usable directly on Coviu.com, but also able to integrate with specialised applications that some of our customers were already using, such as the applications that they spend most of their time in (CRMs, practice management systems, learning management systems, team chat systems). It would need to require our customers to sign up, yet their clients to join a call without sign-up.

    Collaboration is a big problem. People are continuing to get more comfortable with technology and are less and less inclined to travel distances just to get a service done. In a country as large as Australia, where 12% of the population lives in rural and remote areas, people may not even be able to travel distances, particularly to receive or provide recurring or specialised services, or to achieve work/life balance. To make the world a global village, we need to be able to work together better remotely.

    The need for collaboration is being recognised by specialised Web applications already, such as the LiveShare feature of Invision for Designers, Codassium for pair programming, or the recently announced Dropbox Paper. Few go all the way to video – WebRTC is still regarded as a complicated feature to support.

    Coviu in action

    With Coviu, we’d like to offer a collaboration feature to every Web app. We now have a Web app that provides a modern and beautifully designed collaboration interface. To enable other Web apps to integrate it, we are now developing an API. Integration may entail customisation of the data sharing part of Coviu – something Coviu has been designed for. How to replicate the data and keep it consistent when people collaborate remotely – that is where Coviu makes a difference.

    We have started our journey and have just launched free signup to the Coviu base product, which allows individuals to own their own “room” (i.e. a fixed URL) in which to collaborate with others. A huge shout out goes to everyone in the Coviu team – a pretty amazing group of people – who have turned the app from an idea to reality. You are all awesome !

    With Coviu you can share and annotate :

    • images (show your mum photos of your last holidays, or get feedback on an architecture diagram from a customer),
    • pdf files (give a presentation remotely, or walk a customer through a contract),
    • whiteboards (brainstorm with a colleague), and
    • share an application window (watch a YouTube video together, or work through your task list with your colleagues).

    All of these are regarded as “shared documents” in Coviu and thus have zooming and annotations features and are listed in a document tray for ease of navigation.

    This is just the beginning of how we want to make working together online more productive. Give it a go and let us know what you think.

    http://coviu.com/