Behind The Curtain

As you may have guessed from the content of our earlier blog posts, we're working on an AIR application that involves some sort of real-time collaboration. As you may also have guessed from the slower flow of postings since mid-August, we've been very busy working on that application!

We're finally ready to start showing the world what we're working on and to talk about the concepts and technologies behind it. We're also taking early signups for the forthcoming limited beta program. [You can download the public release from the main Broadchoice website]

This blog post contains the first public unveiling of the application and its capabilities. The fundamental concept of the application is to provide a central way to collaborate with your colleagues (or friends). All users have a personal workspace containing files they have uploaded, a blog, a GTD-style task manager and useful bookmarks they have found.

Welcome to the Broadchoice Workspace!

Above you see a user's profile with their contact list on the right and their "ticker" news feed below. I'll talk about spaces in a moment. To the right you can see details of a file that Jack has uploaded with a community rating (120) and comments from other users.

A goal of the workspace is consistency so that all content can be treated in a similar, intuitive way, with publishing, rating, commenting working across all types of content: files, blog posts, tasks, bookmarks etc.

In both screenshots you can see an "instant messenger"-style contacts list showing the presence of other users in the workspace, both for your recent contacts and for users who are part of the spaces in which you are collaborating.

To collaborate with a group of people, you create a "space" and publish content into that space. To the left you can see an example space showing the most active users, the highest rated files, the most recent posts to the space's mailing list, upcoming tasks and most popular bookmarks.

Spaces have access controls to allow owners to publish content securely to a private group or open up selected content to other users within the company.

Since the workspace knows who is logged in at any time, it is easy to engage in real-time collaboration, either through text messaging or through video/audio conferencing.

Here we see a conference room that Jack has created to discuss the T1000 Overview Presentation. A conference room can be started from a space, inviting only the participants of that space, or directly from your contact list by selecting one or more participants to invite.

In addition, all content and people are searchable within the system allowing you to quickly find not only files and blog posts relating to your search criteria but people who have expertise in that area - with presence and chat / conferencing allowing you to get fast answers to your questions. Since your profile can contain not only your areas of expertise but also your interests, you might use the search to find colleagues to go to the ball game with you when you suddenly find yourself with spare tickets!

Finally, the Applications tab provides a place for standard HTML applications that you use every day, such as Salesforce.com or Gmail. The Workspace administrator can prepopulate company-wide applications here but you can also add your own - I often have Pandora running in the Workspace so I can listen to my favorite band, The Fall!

The goal is to provide a way to consolidate your day-to-day collaboration into a single desktop application that provides easy access to information, projects and colleagues with real-time communication built right in.

So what makes all of this tick? Front and central is the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and Flex providing a rich desktop experience. Communication with the server is provided by Adobe's open source remoting and messaging technology, BlazeDS, with the rest of the server stack completed by Groovy, Java, Spring and Hibernate. The real-time communication aspects of the Workspace are provided through Cocomo and Adobe's Hosted Services. We're very excited about the possibilities afforded us by Cocomo: audio/video conferencing, chat, presence, real-time collaboration on documents and so on.

Although we haven't blogged about it much as a group, we are also big fans of cloud computing and run a lot of our day-to-day logging, analysis and monitoring software "in the cloud" on Amazon's EC2. The technology behind the Broadchoice Workspace will allow us to run the free version of the service out in the cloud, providing scalability and flexibility.

Yes, we'll be offering a free version of the Broadchoice Workspace service as well as a "premium" version with expanded capabilities. We'll be starting the beta program fairly soon so be one of the first to sign up for an invitation to collaborate in a new way! [The beta is over - you can download the product from the Broadchoice website]

Screenshots are based on the UI prototype - we'll be publishing screenshots of the live application soon, once it has been skinned!