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cyn.in featured on the Adobe AIR blog

Posted by romasha 4 years 24 weeks ago

Robert Christensen and the Adobe AIR team simply love the new cyn.in desktop client. He has written a very comprehensive post about the cyn.in Desktop on the Adobe Blog. Here's a snippet of what he says:

The cyn.in desktop client is a beautiful new Adobe AIR application designed to improve collaboration between teams. The application, created by Cynapse, includes a variety of powerful features designed to make communication and collaboration easy

Thanks for the mention, its great to know you liked it. We are honored to be featured on the Team blog of Adobe.

Read the full post here: http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2008/12/adobe_air_powered_cynin_deskto.html

Tags:Adobe AIR, Collaboration, cyn.in, cyn.in desktop, cyn.in reviews, Cyn.in v2, open source, Robert Christensen

Views: 3,076, Comments: 0

Enterprise 2.0: Add "Selective Openness" to the mix

Posted by romasha 4 years 26 weeks ago

Why are companies reluctant to adopting Enterpise 2.0 technologies. Evangelists see the benefits, but are they not forceful enough for enterprises? A vital requirement of the enterprise is to make certain information available to employees based on their hierarchy in their organization. However much Web 2.0 technologies try to ebb the lines of information access, enterprises need restrictions on information sharing along with ease of collaboration.

The Enterprise scenario

In my experience, convincing big companies of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is difficult but not impossible. Corporate cultures are still very rigid - follow strict hierarchy, people don't trust each other and there's a whole lot of politics that goes on behind closed doors. These factors make them reluctant to change. The 9X problem of email is true and so is Bernard Lunn's 80%-20% rule. It might seem as if Enterprise 2.0 technology will after all never be adopted by the enterprise itself!

The above is true, because unlike the web, the enterprise is NOT democratic. Plugging web 2.0 philosophy into the enterprise might work for lesser important tools like Twitter. But it cannot work work wonders like it does in the outside world. Though the enterprises are open to increasing participation and communication, they are reluctant to being very transparent. Opening up a financial wiki with the yearly results or the HR wiki with the salary increments, to all employees would be an impossible thought for them.

A presentation that defines Enterprise 2.0 in its true glory.

Enterprise 2.0 software - What is important

With rising competition, the pressure to deliver in short times is high and makes the difference between the deal make-or-break. The need for an easy-to-use tool to create, capture and manage knowledge and make it available to the right people at the right time is the need of the hour.

In evangelizing cyn.in to enterprises, I have learnt that the most important feature for enterprises to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools is "Selective Openness"

Permissions to access information in an enterprise are based on the employee's roles. For example, some NDAs include clauses that disallow the details of a project to be disclosed to anyone else apart from those working on the team. Scenarios where content has to be carefully disclosed, Enterprise 2.0 technologies must play a role of enabling easy (selective) sharing of information at the same time allowing re-use of pre-created information.

cyn.in - social software with Selective Openness

In cyn.in we have a 5-pronged approach to attack this problem:

Main Space - A central no-permissions-required space. A free-form collaboration area where anyone can add, collaborate upon and mine the grey matter of employees to get creative ideas that drive business. Stream of activities flow smoothly with recently worked/commented upon items bubbling to the top, making popular content emergent.
Spaces with permissions - This is vital to large companies with diverse teams, where spaces act as virtual extensions of the physical workspace. Content created inside the spaces is visible only to members of the space. Members inside each space can play different roles like 'reviewer', 'collaborator' or 'viewer' allocated by the 'manager' of the space.
Role based security: Role-based security and permission system allows fine-grained access control on content inside cyn.in. Select users or groups can be allocated explicit permissions to edit or review a wiki page, a blog post or file, enabling security for every item (leaf level) across the system.
Workflows: Ready to use flexible business workflow engine to publish select items from a space to team members or the entire organization. Four step approval workflow allows users to first get a document approved before it is made available to people in the organization.
Permission inheritance: Structured spaces inherit the access right of the Space above it making it easier to work inside space.

I think Spaces in cyn.in add the very special requirement of Selective Openness for enterprises and at the same time keep the web 2.0 concepts alive with the Main Space.

I'd love to hear your opinions on the concept of "Selective Openness" in Enterprise 2.0 applications. Do reply back with your ideas.

Introducing the cyn.in desktop - Fusing the best of instant messengers and web based collaboration software

Posted by dhiraj 4 years 27 weeks ago

The cyn.in desktop is probably the most talked about new thing in cyn.in v2.1 and it truly does merit a blog post of it's own!

What's it got?

A live Activity Stream from your cyn.in site

The cyn.in desktop evolved from a 'Shared Taskbar' concept that we've been toying with for quite some time, now. With the cyn.in desktop we took that concept a bit further and created the Activity Stream - a list of info-tiles that display all recent activity on your cyn.in site, that you are permitted to see. When any user 'touches' any content, by adding, modifying or discussing it, the content item bubbles to the top of the stream, for everyone who has it in their Activity Stream. When there's new activity, the cyn.in desktop will unhide itself and show the new items to you.

Instant Discussions

You can add messages to all items right from the desktop. Instant Discussions is the key feature that makes having the cyn.in desktop such a powerful tool. Instant Discussions provide an immersive, instant messaging like experience, with the distinction of using the activity stream as your IM roster or buddy list.

So, instead of starting conversations with people in general you start (or participate in) discussions with people about a specific context, such as a wiki page, a word document, or even a status message! Threaded discussions are supported as well. Any discussed content bubbles to the top of everyone's activity stream, thus providing an instant audience.

Instant discussions, coupled with the Activity Stream captures conversations of your team members, contextually to the content itself, thus converting simple conversations into reusable knowledge. Knowledge, which would have otherwise been lost inside email inboxes, or instant messaging logs.

Search

You can search for items on your cyn.in site directly from your cyn.in desktop. Find the item you're looking for fast, view it in detail and of course discuss it, right there. Remember discussing something earlier? You can even search within discussions.

Set Status Messages

You can set your Status Message quickly using the cyn.in desktop client. This makes the desktop client the quickest way to post to your status log or microlog. Status messages appear on your team member's activity stream and serves as a simple mechanism to initiate conversations.

Quick flick-thru

Use your keyboard to quickly flick-thru your activity stream or search results. Up-Down changes the currently selected item, Page up / Page down goes to previous and next pages,etc. - you probably ken this already. Consult the Help -> Keyboard shortcuts screen in the client for more shortcuts.

Supports Windows, Mac OSX & Linux

One of the greatest strengths the Adobe AIR platform provides us is the ability to seamlessly deliver the cyn.in desktop across all major operating systems without compromising on user experience or features. And automatic updates of course, we can rapidly deliver updates to fix broken things or add new features, the cyn.in desktop will automatically update itself!

Other features include multi - monitor support, an encrypted storage area to store your username and password (for automatic login), automatic start up, the list goes on...

cyn.in desktop is Open Source software

The source code of the cyn.in desktop is available from our Source Forge community site. Open Sourcing a software is the best way to create the best software possible, because it benefits from both peer review, and peer contributions. We all benefit from open source projects, everything from javascript libraries to entire application servers, and making everything in cyn.in open source is our way of giving back to the community.

Documentation for the desktop client's source code is still a bit sparse at the moment, (that's why it's still called a beta) but we do try to help out as much as we can, do drop in a mail to us (email address is in the README.txt file of the source) if you're looking to contribute in any way to the project.

The Adobe AIR platform

The cyn.in desktop would not have been possible without the amazing Adobe AIR platform. We chose AIR because it so closely matched our beliefs for the best way to deliver the RIA to the desktop. Our reasons to choose to use Adobe AIR to build the cyn.in desktop client include:

All the rich UI possibilities of the Flash Player platform combined with the powerful Flex SDK.
The deployment model (badge / express install) in AIR and the auto-update mechanism is years ahead of it's competition. In an enterprise application like cyn.in, keeping track of who's on which version of the client would have been a nightmare! With the auto-update present in cyn.in we know that we can expect that everyone using it is on the same version.
This is the first time that we've been able to ignore the Operating System (and edition, service pack, flavor, or whatever else have you) while making and testing a desktop product. The experience is 100% same on Windows and Mac, and it runs pretty faithfully on Ubuntu, too!
AIR's unique purely event driven programming was a fresh breath, after mucking around with different models and ways to do multi-threading. Simple is good!

The cyn.in desktop has been in internal beta for over 3 months now, and has been actively used by the teams of a select few customers who volunteered to be a part of the beta. We have had over 2000 users using the cyn.in desktop during the internal beta period and in a detailed survey we conducted with a great number of these users, over 80% agreed that the cyn.in desktop increased their own personal usage of cyn.in by 50%. Most of the companies implementing the beta (along with cyn.in v2.1) agreed that adoption of cyn.in within their employees had doubled in just 6 weeks of usage. These have been very encouraging figures, and I hope all our users enjoy using cyn.in desktop just as much as we do.

Links

Tags:Adobe AIR, blog, Collaboration, cyn.in, cyn.in desktop, Cyn.in v2, Desktop, discussions, Flex, instant discussions, instant messaging, RIA, status message

Views: 6,962, Comments: 5

Contextual Discussions - The most important feature of cyn.in

Posted by romasha 4 years 28 weeks ago

Cyn.in helps people to work together - that is the key function of cyn.in. Since version 1.0, we gathered from our users, the most used feature of cyn.in was commenting. cyn.in has essentially become the 'place' where you put the stuff you want to work on with someone else. And the way to work with that some one else is (apart from co - editing the same file of course) is via commenting. The best thing about collaborating via comments is the fact that the comments always remain attached to the content (or the context) of the stuff that you were working on. Its always search-able and reference-able by any body else that is interested in or joins the team.

Click to zoom

In a small survey that we did with a few of our customers, 80% of them believed that between 30% to 40% of their entire digital knowledge lies in the comments, 60% of them agreed that the number of comments in their cyn.in system is growing faster than the number of content objects being uploaded / created. So why is using comments in cyn.in a better way to collaborate than say using email, or even instant messaging? Three reasons:

It's Contextual - This helps keeping the conversation focused, and helps avoid the pitfalls that modern collaboration systems like instant messaging have often faced in the enterprise scenario; of being a 'time waster' or distraction causer
It's easily available / reachable / findable by everyone related to the context - The quantification of the 'knowledge value' of the conversation seldom happens before the conversation is initiated. In simple terms, we realize the benefit of recording a conversation only when we, or in usual cases some one else requires to know the outcome of the conversation. If the conversation is held using comments in the cyn.in discussion system, its always recorded, and available to all users with permission to the content
With cyn.in 2.1, and the upcoming cyn.in desktop, we are taking discussions to the next level - Cyn.in 2.1 introduces big improvements in the user experience of the discussions system. Ajax based commenting interfaces along with threaded conversations makes commenting a breeze. One of the key capabilities of the cyn.in desktop is going to be able to very very easily comment of stuff from your desktop, without even navigating to the web interfaces. The cyn.in desktop will offer a very familiar and similar experience to instant messaging software, with the key difference of the 'roster' or the 'buddy list' being replaced by the activity stream of content from your cyn.in site.

The cyn.in dekstop v1.0 beta will be released simultaneously along with cyn.in v2.1. It's quite clear now that discussions in cyn.in is a key area of focus for the cyn.in design team, and you will see a lot more interesting innovations in this area, in the near future.

Tags:Collaboration, contextual comments, cyn.in, discussions, Enterprise 2.0, social software, tacit knowledge

Views: 6,711, Comments: 1

Twitter-ing in the Enterprise - are we kidding?

Posted by romasha 4 years 30 weeks ago

Microblogging has become quite a rage these days. Twitter, identi.ca, Jaiku (now acquired by google) are microbloging services that have seen a viral adoption growth since the last couple of years.

Recently, we saw a lot of enthusiasm and discussion about using statuslogging / microblogging tools in the enterprise. While not all have been positive reactions, and the fact that microblogging essentially provides an entirely new communication model to the masses, known to us geeks as the 'publish - subscribe' model, very well explained here, makes it a sort of a paradigm shift for formal communication requirements.

We all know how much businesses hate paradigm shifts, especially when it does not translate directly to increase in revenue. More over, most of these talked about tools are publicly hosted, causing the compliance and security departments to discourage them.

So does the enterprise need another communication tool that lets them publish what they are doing at a given time to people / peers who would be interested in knowing?

We think so.

We have been successfully experimenting with various collaborative applications using status logs with XMPP for a few years now. Status messages have been common over IM platforms, just that they have only been used towards realtime presence. We created various custom applications for various organizations around presence & status logging over their internal IM network, to solve business specific problems such as task reporting, attendance monitoring and sales force geo presence reporting. And since the release of cyn.in v2, we have been working on integrating status logging into cyn.in, such that we could introduce a 'paradigm shifting' model of communication to businesses, without intimidating business users with new technology concepts and jargon. The upcoming cyn.in version 2.1, introduces statuslogging seamlessly integrated into the cyn.in platform, and it's various applications like the wiki, the file repository, etc. We think the success of the whole microblogging application model revolves around integration. Twitter is successful because of the various ways it integrates into tools that people use every day, such as instant messaging, desktop widgets, social network platforms, etc. Similarly we realized that an enterprise version of twitter would really work only if very contextually integrated into the tools that their teams already use for collaboration. Our customers spend significant time on their cyn.in systems collaborating with each other. With cyn.in v2.1, status messages have been tightly integrated into all of cyn.in's applications. Our partners (a growing number since we re licensed cyn.in to be open source software) are using cyn.in as a platform to further build vertical specific collaborative applications, will be able to leverage status messages within their applications with easy to integrate APIs. Status logs thus further extend the 'user context' in cyn.in, an area that has been our key focus. Status messages in cyn.in also have threaded discussions within them, making status messaging the best way to start a conversation! We, and a select few of our enterprise customers, have also been testing the initial versions of the cyn.in desktop, codenamed 'Stacker' since the past six months. Though i cannot reveal much about the stacker at this time, I will say that it does some interesting things with status messages, and sort of blurs the lines between web based collaboration and desktop communication tools like the IM. cyn.in v2.1 releases soon this month. Stay tuned for more updates. I look forward to hearing your opinions.

Tags:Collaboration, cyn.in, enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, microblogging, twitter

Views: 4,547, Comments: 7

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