The Interactive Ideas Blog

Simply-Communicate.com is a UK based website that is passionate about improving internal corporate communications. Their correspondents travel around the world visiting the major conferences on communications and employee engagement. They seek out the latest thinking and case studies that deliver real practical benefits to the large organizations, and share it all online with their community.

We had the pleasure of meeting with Simply Communicate’s Kelly Kass at this year’s Web 2.0 NYC conference. From the many Web 2.0 tools at the expo, Kelly decided to highlight ProtoShare because of its ability to improve a company’s communication and productivity when working on interactive and creative projects.

“There are always changes galore with every Producer and Creative Director wanting to weigh on the content and direction of a piece. Even more challenging is trying to schedule a team meeting to discuss the project; rather than juggling dates in people’s diaries, anyone can simply log on to ProtoShare to look at their prototypes when their schedule permits,” she writes.

“No need to sit in a conference room going back and forth when you can easily post your comments onto the site. For someone who dislikes meetings, that’s a really big appeal for this Global Editor, not to mention lessening the need to email my remarks. Conversations can occur within ProtoShare as a centralized point of communication and my inbox can remain emptier. In these days of information overload, you gotta love that.”

Check out the whole post and watch her video interview with co-founders Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson, and SVP, Sales & Marketing Peter Weiss.

Image used courtesy of James Duncan Davidson.

The creation of, and colloboration on, interactive website wireframes is ProtoShare’s main function, but there are other powerful uses for the tool. We’ll bring you examples of this over the next few weeks. Today we’ll discuss a popular feature: live site review. We’ve heard from many users how they find using the IFrame component an excellent way to review and discuss live sites.

As you know, sometimes the first step in building a new site, or doing an overhaul of a current site, is to analyze and discuss how the current site works - or doesn’t work. It’s very easy to do this by using ProtoShare’s IFrame component:

• Create a page in the Site Map called “Live Site Home” (for example) and click Edit Page.
• In the Editor, drag the IFrame component onto the canvas and click the Refresh button.
• Type the live site’s url into the Source URL field under Settings.
• Re-size the IFrame box to fit your live page.
• Customize your view by selecting Scrolling styles and Frame Border options in Settings.

Now you are ready to open this page in Review and share with your team. Although you can navigate through your entire live site from one page in Review, you’ll probably want to create a page in the Site Map for each of the main sections of the live site. That way your topics and comments will be specific to each page under discussion.

You can also use the IFrame to keep tabs on the development process after you finish your prototype. You can display the development site while it’s still in progress and even click between the Wireframe and Comps tab to get your HTML and CSS styling perfect. This is an excellent way for the developers to share their work with the team and for project managers to make sure everything is on track. IFrame: a great tool for reviewing live sites and sites that are still in development.

The ProtoShare “away team” just spent an excellent week in New York City at the Web 2.0 NY conference, a gathering of existing and new companies with web 2.0 products, technologies, and services. We were excited to attend the event as this was the first event where we showcased our technology in front of Fortune 500 companies and other start-ups. The event was a great success Site9, and ProtoShare was very well received.

Web 2.0 was also an opportunity for us to meet with the press and technical bloggers. We spoke with Technology Review, Venture Voice, Simply Communicate, and JungleG, among many others. We had over 500 visitors to the booth and did demos around the clock. There were so many people signing up for the free 30-day trials and asking questions; it was a good thing we brought four people.

We were impressed with the feedback we got, almost instantaneously. One user signed up and came back the next day to tell us how much he liked the product. People were really excited with the possibilities and benefits of collaboratibe website development. As Jorge Escobar put it on his blog,

We were happy to engage with people from Bank of America, Johnson & Johnson, T-Mobile, IBM, Microsoft, Infosys and the many others who stopped by the booth. While not everyone who stopped by was a website developer, they did see the benefits of the tool for the entire project team, and promised to share ProtoShare with their project teams back home. We also visited Ascentium, R/GA and Octopz, and hope to soon work together.

While in New York City, we also took the opportunity to personally introduce ProtoShare to many of the top interactive agencies. So on our off days, we gave demos and met with G2, Ogilvy Interactive, Euro RSCG 4D, Draftfcb, Avenue A | Razorfish, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies. The meetings all went extremely well.

And since we were in New York, we had to have a good time after hours. Some of the crew went out to see Squeeze and James at Radio City Music Hall, while others explored some of the legendary watering holes of lower Manhattan. The search for Dylan Thomas’s ghost at the White Horse Tavern was mostly unsuccessful. And to top it off, Peter Weiss, our SVP of Sales and Marketing, ran into the inimitable Gilbert Gottfried. Perhaps they shared a few dirty jokes….?

Peter Weiss, SVP Sales & Marketing, with his new best friend, Gilbert Gottfried.

Site 9 CEO, Andrew Mottaz, demos ProtoShare to Kelly Kass of Simply Communicate.

Blake Johnson, VP of Business Development, discussing the benefits of ProtoShare to attendees.

Dave DeAngelis, Director of Product Experience, explains how ProtoShare adapts to various workflows.

In one of our first posts here at the Interactive Ideas blog, we mentioned seeing best-selling author and collaboration guru Don Tapscott deliver an exciting and insightful presentation on the power of web-based collaboration at Portland’s Innotech conference.

His mantra that “mass collaboration changes everything” really resonates with us because ProtoShare was developed with the philosophy of improving and enabling team collaboration. Wikinomics, Tapscott’s latest book, has received accolades from many luminaries of the tech world, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt who said of it, “Wikinomics heralds the biggest change in collaboration to date. Thanks to the Internet, masses of people outside the boundaries of traditional hierarchies can innovate to produce content, goods and services.”

Thus, it’s quite an honor to have our collaborative web development tool featured and discussed on the Wikinomics blog, where there is also an interview with Site9 (developer of ProtoShare) founders Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson.

“ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholders, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers, “ writes Wikinomics team member Will Dick. “By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design.”

Read the interview and explore more on “the cutting edge of mass collaboration” at Wikinomics.com