- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
What’s the number one problem holding enterprise collaboration technology back today? I say it’s images. The beautiful tools you and I talk about on this site do wonders for improving the reach of our words and the depth of our research. What they don’t do is simplify graphical communication.
Graphical communication? Huh?
Office workers are used to sending pictures to each other via email. We can print screen and save it into a word document or paste it directly into a mail client like Outlook. We can do this because the aforementioned programs are thick clients that run on our PCs, not web applications. If you want to paste a screenshot into a *web* document, you’ll have to upload it as an attachment. You’ll likely even have to save the print screen as a jpeg or png using paintbrush first.
Let’s look at the workflow here:
Now imagine yourself trying to convince your coworkers how great life will be once the stop saving everything in Word documents and emails in favor of putting all of their work online. They won’t like it at all! Maybe you can tell them to upload their Word docs to a searchable repository. Maybe you’ll tell them to use Word’s Save As… feature. I guess that works, but it’s nowhere near as painless as the two or three step process they’re using now. People deserve tools that combine the ease of image use in Word with all the magic of wikis – the ability to quickly and easily connect tons of formerly separated ideas and documents.
You and I need to make this better!
A project called Jing attempts to solve this problem by letting users paste their images (and quick screencast videos) onto their web site. Check out Mona Nomura’s review of Jing if you’re curious. From there you can just drop your new Jing URL into your documents. This is nice but – like any software as a service solution – it’s not likely to past the smell test at your enterprise IT shop. Once you start filling up your wiki and your forum with images on an offsite host, you lose the ability to guarantee that those images will stay with you from year to year and system to system. You’ve seen this yourself when you hunt down a two-year-old forum post that purports to explain something you’re curious about but the post turns out to be a link to a now-dead image. That’s not helping you.
A Jing-style solution can and should become the norm for enterprise collaboration, but it’s got to satisfy a few key needs along the way:
- Allow seamless pasting of images into a web browser. Even Jing uses a client-side program to handle your pastes and upload them to their web server. What you need is something like a web control embedded in your collaboration tool’s edit box that accepts pasted graphics and stores them to a server of your choice.
- Allow for maintenance of the image repository. You’ve got to be able to back up and transport your images if your system needs change.
- Support multiple platforms. Flash is as close to universal as a proprietary browser add-on gets, so it’s a likely target for this sort of functionality. You definitely don’t want to pick something that only runs on Windows or OSX or even Internet Explorer.
- Ideally the image itself can be (optionally) stored as an object inside the relevant web document rather than in a standalone image repository.
That’s my list of demands! Take Jing and rebuild it in-house. Open source it. Improve it to lose the dependence on client-side software. Now you’ve built something that any organization can use to help their enterprise collaboration adoption problems.
