When you’re working in any sort of time-sensitive environment, having real-time communication is paramount. Here at TNW we’ve tried a number of different options for working across distances while still keeping that face-to-face communication. For the past two weeks, and moving forward, our solution is Convofy.
Convofy is a work platform that will be very familiar to anyone who used FriendFeed and its group functions. But where FriendFeed groups were great for real-time communication, they lacked in providing much more than that. The market is picking up, with Chatter, ,Yammer and more, but Convofy has grabbed our attention for a few reasons.
Overview
At its heart, Convofy is a glorified chat room. Your administrator signs up and can invite others from the same email domain. Once invited, you’ll need to download the Convofy app, which is based on Adobe AIR (more on that in a bit). Logging in, you have a few simple profile options, and then you’re set to go.
Administrators can set up groups, making messages considerably easier to sort. Beyond the groups, you can also create lists, as well as calendar events to keep groups notified of upcoming events. Sharing content to your groups is supremely simple, and offers some rich options. To do so quickly, just drag a link, file or photo to a Quick Add (the green +, on the left in this shot) on your desktop.
Digging Deeper
What really sets Convofy apart is what you can do with information that is shared inside of it. No matter the content that is shared, anyone who can see it can comment on it, annotate it and keep a progressive, flowing discussion about it. While each item does show up in your news feed, it is also given its own page on which all of the annotation and discussion can happen.
As you can see in the shot above, Zee shared a link. By going to the page for the link, its webpage is displayed for me in a new tab, but I can do real-time annotation on it. Fortunately, the marks do not stay in place all the time. In order to get a mark to re-appear, you’ll need to click on the comment in which it was made. This keeps the entire thing from getting overly messy, while still allowing long conversations with huge amounts of mark-up.
Every time that you share something in Convofy, you have the option to do considerably more than just add some text. Choosing between Files, Links, Notes, Task Lists and Milestones is as easy as clicking on the appropriate action and adding any text that you want to be displayed with your post.
Of course, if you’re only looking for some specific items in your feed, you can choose to apply filters that will show each of the above-named items.
Private messaging is handled just like any other IM client. Clicking on someone’s name takes you to their profile, and you can send a message to them directly. While you lose the ability to share rich media content, it’s great for holding conversations that don’t need to be seen by the rest of a team.
Posting to any group can be done via email, and the mobile version of Convofy is a web-based HTML5 site that works exceptionally well across Android, iOS and more. There are email notifications available, as well, but be forewarned that they’ll get very spammy if you’re working with a large team. Desktop notifications are a near-must for us, to make sure that we don’t lose messages. Fortunately, Convofy has implemented them and they work in real time.
Our Complaints
At this point, it’s safe to say that our complaints are…not many. We would love it if Convofy were web-based, rather than being an application you were forced to download. It seems strange to build native applications for a platform that is directed at web-based communication. Though it’s arguably easier to offer a more standardized experience for users with a native app, a web-based app would be very welcome.
The only other gripe that we run into on any sort of consistent basis is in how Convofy updates the timelines. We have 5 groups for TNW. If someone posts, then another person posts, and then the first person posts again, it will group the posts of an individual together, rather than having them display in a timeline format.
In all fairness, the Convofy team has been exceptionally receptive to our suggestions and criticism, making changes swiftly during the two-week period. This is the only looming suggestion that we’ve had which has not yet been changed.
Worth the While?
If your business is deeply ingrained with Yammer or Chatter, then the transition to Convofy might be difficult. However, it’s still worth a serious look. The simplicity with which Convofy enables you to bring context to the entire Internet is absolutely unbeatable.
If you’re not yet using any sort of network, then you absolutely must look at Convofy. Doing everything over Skype? You’re missing the point. Nothing but email? Spammy and ineffective. Convofy is like having your entire workforce in the same office, no matter where in the world you might be.
The public beta for Convofy opens up today, at 12:30pm Pacific time. So go, load up the Convofy site now and keep hitting refresh until you can get in. While you’re at it, have a look at the Convofy promo video. It’s not fluff. It really is this fluid and robust.
if you run a small or medium sized business – particularly one with a number of different departments – i highly highly HIGHLY recommend you try this.
Looks pretty cool and simple. Much better than sending emails to coworkers all the time for sure :).
@Stefan Meeuws no kidding. And honestly i’ve tried every single enterprise messaging tool out there, the one that comes closest to this is Friendfeed and it wasn’t even designed for it. Social Cast comes a close second.
@Zee @Stefan Meeuws He’s not exagerating. You should see the torture we’ve been thru :P
@Brad McCarty @Zee @Stefan Meeuws If it is enterprise, we have tried it. Nice to finally have a home, tho.
@Brad McCarty @Zee I believe you both, hopefully that ordeal now has ended and Convofy will lead you into the light… into the light… into the light… FOLLOW IT INTO THE LIGHT!
Interesting adaptation – I think the #1 problem that Convofy has is the UI. What’s a Direct vs a Follower — and in the year 2011 why are people still using the term follower? Make the UI too confusing and the adoption from deep in the organization is going to be tough. Been There. Done That.
On the plus side I love the chat feature — the notifications seem to work especially well which is really important for a desktop communication tool. Not sure if group chat is supported but I don’t think so.
We’re Socialcast users and love that service. Socialcast strikes what seems as the proper blend of functionality and UI ease of use.
For our use (managing a team of 27 ERP consultants scattered across the USA) one of the more attractive features of Convofy is that we can add people to groups and the people (who may only be casual business acquaintances) cannot see the main organization feed.
Socialcast exposes that main feed to everyone — which is a huge fail for organizations who think they may want to invite a customer to participate in a group — the problem being is the customer will see all the mis-posted stuff or personal rants that go into the main news feed.
Another problem that all of these social sharing tools have is there’s no easy way to move stuff from one group to another. If you mis-post to one group an administrator can only delete. How hard is it to allow for moving of content?
Top Plusses (based on a half hour look and comparison to Socialcast)
- The drag/drop (+) bar — nice for sharing
- LIve chat with notifications
- Live presence indicator (sadly absent on Socialcast)
- Group members can be added from outside the organization (email domain) AND they cannot see anything in the system except the group (do NOT overlook this point if you think you’ll want to share with casual collaborators – this is HUGE). Am not sure if Yammer has this same feature (I think it does) but Socialcast does not.
- Markup of documents (though I think this is more “demo dazzle” than a real world tool that most companies would use.
Top Minusses:
- I login to Socialcast all the time from client sites – having only an Adobe Air client for Convofy is a mark against them
- The UI is goofy and I think the whole sidebar with Direct, Tasks, Discussions, Chats, Drafts, Trash is way too complex. It’s going to drive people away from full adoption as you go deeper in the organization.
I’m still scratching my head over what the “Chats” link does. And the directs? Is that people who report to me in the organization? And why would that be different than followers? It’s way too confusing. First looks are critical in this area.
Clicking on “My Tasks Lists” confusingly throws me into a full screen of some type of info — away from the main feed. From there the user has to stop and figure out how to get back.
This kind of UI stuff needs to be clean (see Facebook which isn’t perfect but is easy enough for Grandma to figure out without calling the family for lessons — THAT is where these social tools need to be in ters of ease of use) so that people adopt instead of scratch their heads.
- Lack of native mobile application is going to be a minus here (and no use of email to reply is not acceptable because, heck, aren’t we using this to get away from email. Yeah the HTML site looks cool — where are the push notifications going to come from? Email? See prior comment. Aren’t we using this to get away from email. This is going to be a ball and chain for Convofy. Not a huge issue if you’re all sitting in an office but that’s not the trend today.
- Use of Adobe Air — this needs to also have a native web interface so you can login from remote workstations without a full AIR setup. You don’t stop when you are at a client site and think that you can’t check GMAIL because you have to download an app — why should you have a more inconvenient experience with Convofy which is supposed to eliminate that problem (email overload).
Just my impressions based on about 60 minutes use and comparison to Socialcast which we have used for about 6 months and Yammer (used about 2 months) for a group of 27 consultants.
Ok – I see that the chat list summarizes your chats. My confusion was that last night while I was chatting — if I clicked that link it was blank. I believe Convofy takes some time to index the content in the system (and, yeah I think that’s a problem).
@Wayne Schulz We used SocialCast for a very long time and were generally pleased with it. The issue that we had was that the desktop app was horrible and often wouldn’t update in real time.
I have to agree on many of your points. The navigation is something that took most of our team a good day to get used to, and that’s probably not acceptable.
I also see your point on directs. I actually had that same problem yesterday. Direct messages were telling me that they’d updated only minutes ago, when I hadn’t spoken to someone in over an hour. It doesn’t seem to be updating the Directs link as quickly as it once did. I’ll drop a line to the Convofy team about that.
There’s a plus and a minus to native apps for mobile. As you said, without native we don’t get push notifications (though I suppose you could set up some workaround with Boxcar or the like with a notifications-only email address). Again, not really an acceptable answer as you’d need to have that option in the app itself, rather than working around it.
Thanks for your thoughts, Wayne. I’m sure the Convofy team is reading this, and they’ve been ace at taking to task the problems that we’ve seen thus far.