December 2007

So, we've just shipped BRIO beta, and I wish I could say we've taken some time to relax; but we haven't. One of the great/horrible things about Hosted Services is that as bugs come in, we can fix them right away and redeploy... So keep the bug reports / suggestion coming, and we'll keep plugging away.

We did take time to read through the reviews out there, of course. We've always kept our eye on Robin Good's input, as he's got as much experience analyzing and reviewing Collaborative apps as anyone out there. Check out his very detailed review :

Robin Good BRIO beta review

One thing that caught my eye (besides "There is no other competitor in this marketplace that offers this much for this little", or "Brio is a breakthrough web conferencing solution") is his call-out of the whiteboard functionality. I'd love to hear more of his thoughts on this, and would suggest he apply for a Cocomo private beta account - the whiteboard is built for extensibility, so that any Flex developer should be able to make new tools for it. I would love for someone motivated to add tools to join up :)

Second item for today : Peldi took some time to go through the BRIO source code and come up with a few statistics. The 2 things he was interested in :

1) How much of BRIO are we shipping as part of the reusable Cocomo Flex SDK?
2) How much of BRIO was built on the server, and how much on the client?

Check out this pair of graphs for the results :

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised by just how far we've come. Consider that the server code in question will be the same services provided for every Cocomo app, and you get a sense of what we're trying to do here - Apps on the client (built on our Cocomo Flex SDK), Services on the server.

It's been about a year and 4 months since we started prototyping the basics of Cocomo - establishing a Session with the services, and working on a new approach to real-time messaging that would accomplish 2 goals :

1) Be robust enough to handle all of the needs of a complex app like Breeze/Connect.
2) Be designed in such a way that an ENTIRE MEETING application could be written COMPLETELY on the client, using a generic set of "real-time collaboration" services on the backend.

Well, we're proud to announce that the goals have been met - the results are Cocomo (our client-server framework for real-time collaboration, which, go listen to me ramble here, if you want more details), and what we're unveiling today - codenamed BRIO.

(click to see this a little bigger)

BRIO is the beta codename next generation of Connect/Breeze. It's also FREE, for up to 3 people in a room at once.

Getcherself a BRIO Room here!

The great thing from my perspective is that we've really taken the time to validate the framework here, and really executed on the concept - our Cocomo server framework is now deployed and public-facing, and will (soon, soon!) provide the same backend services for applications that any Flex developer can use in their own applications. You did know that there's a private beta for the Cocomo Flex components about to start, didn't you?

Hopefully you’ve all had a chance to play around with the demo app that Nigel posted a few weeks back, and you are as ecstatic as we are about the opportunities that Cocomo creates for developers.

As we continue to march toward our milestones, we want your feedback and help in making sure that we provide the best kick-ass web services platform for real-time collaboration and social media.

The Cocomo team is taking private beta applications starting today -- APPLY NOW!