In a conversation with one of the Adobe staff in the UK, an inspiring although not surprising story was told. He works frequently with a number of departments in the UK Government, and knows quite well that it is typically a long process when updating any sort of policy or procedure, even for minor updates. And so, here's the story... and perhaps a good example for others who may find themselves in the same position.
As a student at City College in San Francisco over the summer, I used Buzzword to complete my class essays. I have to confess that it's a given that I would, since I'm also Community Manager for Acrobat.com. As many of us students will be returning to class in the coming weeks, I want to encourage you all to give Buzzword a try. What I found is that Buzzword so easy to use and elegant, it quite literally makes working on assignments more fun.
For instance, when approaching a topic, I have a jumbled buzz of ideas in my head that I want to capture, and translating the thoughts into a coherent report is easier with Buzzword. Buzzword's comment feature allows me to jump to the side of the current sentence to add a note to myself - a nice place holder to remind me to look up a fact or research an example - without interrupting the flow of the writing. Here's a screenshot of what I mean:
After reading the rough draft, the comment feature also comes in handy for additional thoughts such as what I need to add, where it's best to add it, what I should consider deleting, and what I need to think about some more before committing it in my report. It's a much quicker - and also more tree friendly - process vs. printing out a copy and then hand writing comments.
It's not that we are smarter or more creative. It's not because we like each other more. It's because we've found a new way to work.
We get more work done, much better than your team, in much less time, because we use Acrobat.com.
And from a personal standpoint, by working this way I get fewer emails and spend less time in meetings, yet I get more done, have more time to think, and enjoy my work and my co-workers more. How does that sound to you?
Let me give you a real world example of how this happens.
Fred Bayles, a Professor at Boston University School of Journalism, is a hard man to talk to. Not because he's unfriendly or isn't interested in talking, but he's got other priorities. During the semester, he's generally got a desk phone attached to one ear, a cell phone on the other and his fingers on a keyboard. At the other end of the phones and on his email are his students who are on Beacon Hill (Boston) staffing BU's Statehouse Program. They're reporters covering government and politics for a dozen local newspapers, websites, and radio stations around the state. And Bayles is their editor/teacher/mentor.
I was one of those 6th grade nerds in the AV corps. We were the guys who got to run the projectors or show the filmstrips. We'd wheel the equipment around the school and feel quite important because we knew stuff the teachers didn't - like how to thread a 16mm projector or splice a film. But there was always a projector bulb or a fuse blown that would sabotage our efforts. And it seems like even today, even with our technology advances, there's always a glitch that gets in the way of our best-laid plans.
There has been some commentary about SharePoint over the past couple weeks that helps mark the path we are taking with Acrobat.com, so I thought I would weigh in.
To some extent, Acrobat.com owes its success so far to the SharePoint story. No, we don't use SharePoint, and we don't directly integrate with it either (maybe someday). But SharePoint has introduced people to the promise of better collaboration, or as Thomas Vander Wal said, it is acting as the "gateway drug to enterprise social tools." And at the same time it has opened up an opportunity for Acrobat.com to actually deliver on the promise of better social collaboration at work without the pitfalls that Dion Hinchcliffe recently described as "the issues and challenges of using SharePoint for Enterprise 2.0."
A recent survey we did of Acrobat.com users highlighted the gap between the big promises and meager payoffs of Enterprise 2.0 so far. I think this is the most interesting statistic:
There are as many people who have stopped using SharePoint for sharing and collaborating on documents as there are people currently using it.
(This entry is authored by Ruchi Kumar, a graduate student at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, working as a business systems analyst here at Adobe for a summer internship.)
So who does the Acrobat.com services benefit? One possible scenario is for students at grad schools (like me!). Many courses are project oriented with typical team sizes of 3-4 people. This brings up the scheduling issue - with everyone having their own busy schedules and priorities, it gets difficult to setup a time and space where all can physically meet. In the past, we were forced to juggle with a wide range of collaboration tools to solve these concerns.
This might go without saying, but let's say it anyway: at Buzzword, we're interested in making things look good. This interest applies not only to the application itself, but also to the final product that the user creates using the application. Bearing this in mind, imagine our delight when our PR team took a document we'd finished together in Buzzword and redesigned it, returning with the following:
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Note: The widget used here is from Acrobat.com's Share; we copied the embed code directly from Share, and inserted it directly into this post. Feel free to flip through and read the file.
...WHAT?! We were thrilled with the results, but also intrigued: how did they do that? Although we'd love to claim responsibility and say it was all done in Buzzword, that's not exactly the case. Here's the full story.
Wow, glad to have that behind us, now back to work changing the way people work, for the better!
Thanks for all the attention, but you people should stop surfing the web over breakfast coffee and before and after lunch, and spread your tire-kicking out a little! Just kidding, that's life on the web and we were mostly ready for it, but it is pretty tense watching the sun rise over the world on a launch day like Monday.
I'll come back to more details on the "mostly" stuff and lessons learned sometime soon, but I wanted to give a quick update on how things are going, and clarify some stray memes about Acrobat.com that are flying around on the series of tubes serving the web.
Happy Labor Day everyone. Here’s a pair of vignettes from our signup stories. The first, from John Burland (who did a nice write-up of Buzzword on his blog, You Must Be From Away), provides a shining example of off-beat native New Zealand humor:
I was orphaned at an early age (my grandparents - childless, unfortunately - went down with the Titanic.)
Is that good enough? No?
OK, read about Buzzword on Wired, need desperately something that’s as good as this and I PROMISE that I’ll tell all the others in my geriatrics water polo group, all of whom appear to be early adopters of cutting-edge technology. We all have laptop cradles on our Zimmer-frames.
You may have noticed that when you go to request an invitation to try our Preview edition, we ask that you tell us a story about why you need a web-based word-processor. There are many reasons for this apparently gratuitous step; for one thing, it helps us understand how people want to use our product.
On the other hand, at Buzzword we’re all about writing, and ennobling the entire authoring process, so we like to encourage the muse in everyone.
Some people write their story based on the facts - e.g. “I am a Technical Publications Manager who works remotely some 1700 miles from the home office. I am still searching for the ultimate collaborative documentation environment to perform peer reviews etc.”
Here’s another usage scenario that we think is particularly appropriate for the use of Buzzword. This message mentions a challenge the author has encountered using Google Docs, so offers an opportunity to discuss ways that we think Buzzword is different.
We'd like to use this space to describe some of the usage scenarios that we think would be addressed and improved by a rich, on-line authoring and collaboration environment.
Our expectation is that the task commonly known as "word-processing", though constantly maturing, is in the early stages of a dramatic evolution. Migrating the authoring environment on-line isn't just about moving the same feature set to a different environment; more importantly, it's about exploiting the capabilities of the new platform to better suit what users are trying accomplish.
