Advanced Reality Presence-AR Adapter for Excel, Feb 23

Brian Hoogendam, CEO of Advanced Reality, briefed me this morning on its Presence-AR Adapter for Excel, which makes Excel spreadsheets collaborative objects. In a nutshell, participants sign into a data collaboration session, where cell-by-cell changes are immediately shared between all participants. It isn't screen sharing, either, so that any participant can modify cells in the shared spreadsheet. As I've been writing my soon-to-be-published Pillar 3 document ("real-time joint editing and review of documents"), I have been thinking about the ideal capabilities of the pillar ... and Advanced Reality pretty much have it nailed.

Neat Things about Presence-AR for Excel
There are some outstanding things about the adapter and its usage in practice:

• Collaboration on cell data, not Excel. The contents of the cells in an Excel spreadsheet are shared, not the overall Excel application. Everyone needs to have Excel installed, and the initiator of the shared session decides what spreadsheet to share.


• Complete audit trail of changes. Whenever the contents of a cell is changed, a cell note is created noting who made the change and what the original value was. If subsequent changes are made, those changes are appended to the cell note.



• Simultaneous multiple-person real-time editing. Multiple people can edit and revise cells within the shared spreadsheet at the same time. Control doesn't have to be handed back-and-forth ... it's a free-for-all.


• Users can work on separate sheets or different places. Different people within the collaboration session can work in different places of the spreadsheet; one can be on sheet 1, another on sheet 2, a third of sheet 36, and a fourth also in sheet 1 working in a different area.


• Find Me / Follow Me. Users can work independently within a shared spreadsheet, and then when it is time to see what others are up to, it's very straightforward. There are two options available in the control panel: find another user, or follow another user. If Find, then the user is taken to where the other person is working. If Follow, the user sees the cells and sheets that another user is traveling through.



• Restricted editing settings. The owner of the spreadsheet can establish restricted editing settings on a user-by-user basis. This means that they can only change cells within the established range. If they try to edit cells in other parts of the spreadsheet, as soon as they press enter, the original value is restored.



• Restricted viewing settings. The owner of the spreadsheet can also limit others to viewing only certain portions of the shared spreadsheet. This means that confidential information or business logic can be blanked out, but a collaboration can still occur over a number of key fields.

Advanced Reality also has an adapter for PowerPoint, which enables collaboration around PowerPoint presentations. Similar concepts reign: as each letter is typed, it is shared; people can be viewing and editing different slides; and the owner of the presentation can initiate a slide show for all participants. I didn't get a demonstration of this. The adapter does not support slide locking, but that was a design choice by Advanced Reality rather than a fundamental limitation.

Concerns about Presence-AR for Excel
I have two very minor concerns ... but they are very minor and definitely not showstoppers:

• The control panel hangs to one side. The control panel ... for setting who can edit or view specific components of the spreadsheet ... stands alone. I guess the user could re-position the items on their screen so that it hung down the right hand side, but then it's not really optimized for that due to its layout. Perhaps Advanced Reality could rework its layout to make it sit better in parallel with Excel.


• 15 MB download and client install. For the benefit it gives, I'd swallow the concept of requiring a client install. It can probably be rolled out via a system management application.

Resources for Further Investigations
Advanced Reality Home Page
Presence-AR Adapter for Excel product page
Presence-AR Adapter for PowerPoint product page
White Paper on Contextual Collaboration (PDF)

The Excel adapter is an off-the-shelf packaged product from Advanced Reality that was built using its wider platform for data-centric collaboration. Organizations can license the overall platform and build data-centric collaboration capabilities into its suite of enterprise and line-of-business applications.

Presence-AR Platform product page

Bottom Line
Advanced Reality isn't paying me to say this ... but its Excel adapter absolutely ROCKS! Stop spending your money on buying new versions of Microsoft Office and high-tail it over to Advanced Reality. Download the free trial, and then once you've proven the benefit within your environment, buy! There's a lot more strategic business value to be gained through true multi-person collaboration within an Excel spreadsheet, as compared to merely buying a product with a prettier interface or bearing the latest release number.