Advanced Reality is back from the dead. The company was founded in 2000 to offer collaboration capabilities for real-time interaction on data in word processing, spreadsheeting, and presentation packages. It had some interesting ideas that I wrote about at the time, but has been dead in the water for the past 18 months or so. But it’s back with a new product and a new management team.
Advanced Reality offers four products, the first three of which are carried over from its earlier days and very much focused on the corporate market. The fourth is its new offering, with a consumer markets focus:
- Presence-AR Framework. A platform for embedding real-time collaborative capabilities into applications.
- Presence-AR Adapter for Microsoft Excel. A packaged add-on that enables real-time collaboration and joint controlled editing of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
- Presence-AR Adapter for Microsoft PowerPoint. A real-time co-editing and online presentation add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint.
- Jybe. Its new offering for real-time web co-browsing, released in beta on January 24.
Using Jybe
Jybe is a plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox that enables two or more people to co-browse Web sites and pages in real-time. Jybe adds two buttons to the browser: Create Session and Join Session. This is pretty much in line with the earlier deliverables from Advanced Reality. Here is what it looks like in Firefox on the Mac.
To create a sharing session, the initiator clicks “Create Session” and enters their name and the name of the session.
This creates the session on the Jybe server, and adds a chat and status pane to the bottom of the browser window.
Using other means … a phone call or an email or an IM … the initiator informs others of the session name. They in turn click “Join Session” and enter their name and the name of the session they want to join. New users are announced in the text chat window.
Assessing Jybe
There’s some neat things about Jybe:
- It’s free to use. You can’t argue with that.
- It’s multi-platform, supporting Windows 2000 and above, Linux and Mac OS. The download for IE is 688 KB, and for Firefox is 7 KB. Big difference. The Firefox install on the Mac OS worked flawlessly, but the IE install on my Windows XP laptop needed a bit of hand-holding.
- Eavesdropping is hard. The sessions are created on the Jybe server, but are not published as being active and available. People have to know the session name to get in. There is no directory of current sessions maintained or published.
- It’s easy to use. Anyone in the session can type a text chat line, and anyone can control the current destination on the browser.
- It works. I installed it on two machines, and co-browsed just like the literature said. Response time for updating a page on the second machine was 5-7 seconds.
- For a price, it can be enterprise-friendly: centralized roll-out and deployment by IT, session encryption, and directory integration with LDAP and Active Directory. A Jybe server is available for a totally inhouse deployment.
Obviously this is very early days for Jybe, as this is just a beta release, but I see some things that are needed:
- The ability to kick a user off. Maybe someone is hanging around and you want them to leave. Only the initiator should be able to do this, however.
- The delivery of the entire text chat transcript to anyone who joins the session. If a team used this for a team meeting and someone was a couple of minutes late, they’d miss out on any of the text chat that was previously engaged in.
- A guest in the Jybe user forum suggested showing mouse movements so that someone could direct others to look at a specific part of the screen. It’s a good idea, but it presents some interesting implementation issues if two or more people end up fighting for control of the mouse.
- It doesn’t support tabbed browsing in Firefox, but looks like it does. The chat and status box at the bottom of the browser window carries across to all open tabs, but only the tab in which the session was created actually displays for the other attendees.
Final Words
Jybe requires a installation of the Jybe client, which will be a problem in lock-down corporate environments. But for home and independent professional users, or those in small businesses with less restrictive IT policies, this is a simple and worthwhile addition to everyday collaboration capabilities. Ideally such capabilities should be a natural and integrated capability of Web browsers, but until then, Jybe away.
Is co-browsing of Web sites important or useful to you in your work or personal life? Please drop me a line by email to let me know how you use co-browsing, or leave a comment below.
