One of the things that I often hear customers talk about is a need for a Single Source of Truth, or when referring to creative review or design collaboration it’s a Single Source of Review Truth.

I heard it first about a year ago and lately its been coming up more and more with creative teams and organizations of all shapes and sizes. I found the term intriguing when I first heard it applied to creative review. I have started asking our customers and teams that we are visiting for the first time to explain what a Single Source of Review Truth means to them.

What it boils down to is these organizations want a single, centralized location that collates and publishes all of the information related to the review of one or more assets or a campaign or a project or whatever the individual team is organized around producing, reviewing and delivering.

They want that single, centralized location to have everything from:

• Feedback (re: who said what, when did they say it, etc.) TO
• Change Requests (re: change blue to green, make the font bigger, etc.) TO
• Status (re: has everyone finished approving, have everyone finished approving, etc.) TO
• Any other information relevant to being able to initiate, conduct and finish a review

Many organizations still using email for creative review point to the Single Source of Review Truth as the primary reason they adopt ConceptShare.

With a Single Source of Creative Review Truth they are able to make the best possible decisions as quickly as possible. Information related to a review is immediately shared with the right stakeholders.

Single Source of Review Truth =

The Right Information@ The Right Time w/ The Right Stakeholders =

Making Good Decisions & Making Them Quickly

With a centralized source of review information, teams are no longer chasing down feedback littered across multiple email threads; no longer collating feedback, approval responses and change requests across multiple threads.

Everything they need related to a review is in a single, centralized location.

Where is your Single Source of Creative Review Truth?

Based in the Metro NY area, DXB works hard to help their clients take their “back of the napkin” ideas and turn them into real, valuable assets for their business. The DXB team provides a wide range of services; including the design and development of website and mobile applications. You can see some of the work they’ve done here.

Jay Melone is the President and Founder at DXB, and spends most of his time meeting with new and existing clients to understand their online needs. Jay took some time to tell us about his company, and how ConceptShare has streamline the creative review process between DXB and their clients.

Tell us a little about yourself and your company.

DigitalXBridge (“DXB”) is a digital agency based out of the NY metro area. We dream up, analyze and create custom web and mobile solutions for our clients.

Me? I’m Jay. I’m responsible for finding and convincing people to pay us to build their online products. I guess I’m a bit of a matchmaker meets magician.

What kind of assets do you produce?

Aside from the occasional flying pig, we offer anything from creating logo designs and marketing collateral to building and architecting fully-custom web and mobile platforms.

Tell us about your pre-ConceptShare days.

Oh, these were dark, dark days. We would gather our clients around a rusty old oil lamp in an abandoned shed in the woods and flip through hand drawn sketches of websites…. Well, maybe not that bad, but pretty bad.

Before ConceptShare, we relied heavily on sending assets back and forth via screen sharing meetings, emails and phone calls. It sucked. Miscommunication and misunderstanding were not only the norm, we pre-buffered time into our estimates. Our entire design process was painful and ripe with process gaps and client frustration.

What was the single biggest pain point pre-ConceptShare?

The flow of communication was dreadful. Worst case email conversations would go something like this…

[DXB] Hi John, attached is a concept for the new home page.

[John] Thanks, but I can’t open the attachment.

[DXB] Try this one.

[John] OK, I see it. I don’t like how the bullets look.

[DXB] Which bullets, the ones at the top of the page with your contact info or the ones related to product XYZ toward the bottom?

[John] The ones at the top. But for the ones at the bottom we should use a different font.

[DXB] Can we set up a quick Skype chat to discuss?

… then after at least one meeting (often several) where we’re all on the same page … we repeat for each page. And that was just round 1. Yikes.

Why did you choose to use ConceptShare over competitors and/or other review methods like email, wikis, etc.

Sometime before ConceptShare I had found Balsimiq Mockups, but there was not true user feedback. You still had to send things back and forth, so that didn’t work. So I began searching for tools that would close the feedback loop for our design process. ConceptShare seemed like a good solution.

How have your processes changed since implementing ConceptShare?

Our process has been completely re-architected around (among other tools) ConceptShare. From project kick-off, our clients are introduced to ConceptShare. We’ve compiled a few screenshots to help them understand what it is and how to get up and running with it, quickly.

In general, our clients absolutely love it. We’ve heard comments about how professional our process is, due in part to how we’ve evolved to implement tools like ConceptShare.

What are the 3 most valuable ConceptShare features for your workflow?

1. Email inbox replying really removed a huge barrier to entry for some of our customers that don’t want to have to log into yet another tool. This has helped us with our customer adoption significantly.

2. File versioning/comparing is really important because often clients will say “I liked the color of that button better in version 2, but with the copy you used in version 10.”

3. Workspaces, folders and associated permissions help us ensure clients are receiving and contributing to only the projects they’ve been granted access to, which is critical when dealing with the strict NDAs we’re under.

If you were at a cocktail party and met your twin who had never heard of ConceptShare, how would you explain it to them?

First of all I’d ask him why he didn’t tell me he was coming and why he’s wearing my new jacket without asking. Then I’d tell him that “ConceptShare is a tool that allows creatives to receive design feedback from their clients in an intuitive, visual way.”

Thanks, Jay! As always, we’re love to hear how are customers are using ConceptShare, and to learn how we can make our tool even better for them. If you’d like to be featured in our Customer Spotlight series, let us know in the comments, or through Twitter.

No, 9-year olds are not a new market that we are selling to. I read this post on Inc.com about how in today’s world of information overload the job of the sales person is so much harder. It’s so much harder to cut through the clutter, distractions and never ending list of priorities vying for the customer’s attention. It’s so much harder to say something that will be remembered an hour later, a day later, a week later or a month later.

The article goes on to suggest that if you can’t answer 3 basic questions about you or your business in a way that a 9-year old can comprehend, then you are probably confusing your customers as well. More importantly you are not communicating anything they are going to remember.

Challenge accepted.

The natural tendency when faced with this challenge is to use the, “throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks” approach. Maybe if I use enough big words and communicate my value prop in big, elaborate terms the person I am trying to connect with will remember my company, my product and me.

Wrong! 

Just like the article highlights it doesn’t work. Most of us are geared to remember simple things and not complex ideas or jargony language.

Unfortunately most people that speak to customers (sales, marketing, support, product) have been trained to over complicate, pontificate and try and pitch our services, products and ideas as if we were explaining the theory behind E=MC²

So for my own benefit here is how I would explain ConceptShare to a 9-year old.  It’s the same way I would describe it to a partner, customer or individual user.

What Does ConceptShare Do?

ConceptShare is a web-based tool that makes it easy to draw (circles, arrows, etc.) on top of creative work (images, documents, web pages, audio, interactive, video), so people can provide quick and accurate feedback.

Why Do People Decide To Use ConceptShare (Translation: what pain is being addressed)?

ConceptShare makes it easy for teams to immediately and accurately understand one other’s feedback on creative work and reduce the number of mistakes and redos; ultimately saving time and money.

Why Don’t They Do It Themselves (Translation: why don’t they build it themselves)?

ConceptShare spends 100% of its time understanding what customers need and developing the best possible tool for drawing circles on top of files. With that much focus, time and resources we can build something better than what others can build on their own.

Is this oversimplifying it? To a certain extent it is, but remember the goal is for the person you are communicating with to understand what you do. In its most simplest form.

Get them to understand the core of what you do and they’ll remember you and invite you back to tell them more. That is when you have permission start to peel back the layers of the onion and get to the more complicated stuff.

Keep it simple.

The Bellezo family has long standing tradition of working in the hair and beauty industry. The joke is they practically came out the womb with perfectly styled hair! Their recipe for success is rooted in a simple rule: always focus on the customer. That mantra stretches from selling premium brands like American Crew, L’Oreal, Joico and Aveda to providing fanatical customer and beauty advice usually only available to the Hollywood set.

Gary MacDonough is Bellezo’s Digital Marketing Manager responsible for delivering marketing campaigns that are timely, relevant and valuable to their customers.  He took some time out to answer a few questions about why and how Bellezo uses ConceptShare.

Tell us a little about yourself and your company.

Bellezo.com is a customer service focused hair and beauty e-commerce company that provides a great selection of top quality branded products at competitive prices.  Our company ethos is centred on our tagline ‘Beauty – Enhanced By Service’ which is reflected in everything we do.

What kind of assets do you produce?

Happy beautiful smiley faces of course! Ha excuse the cheesiness but in many respects that is what we aim to achieve.  We will stop at nothing to ensure our customers are 100% satisfied and happy with our products and services.

Tell us about your pre-ConceptShare days. How did you review before using ConceptShare?

I shudder to think of it now but our pre-Conceptshare days were medievally dark, dreary and above all demanding.  The laborious process of exchanging countless images via email attachment concerning differing aspects of visual projects and graphics was extremely inefficient and time consuming.

What was the single biggest pain point pre-ConceptShare?

Communication – It was extremely difficult to convey constructive criticism of a visual project in order to yield the results we desired.  Here is a typical comment that we all had to endure ‘can you change the background colour of the second homepage banner to a couple of shades lighter?’.  Multiply this by a thousand and you see how easily confusion and communication breakdowns can occur.  Providing feedback was like making tea with a chocolate teapot.

Why did you choose to use ConceptShare over competitors and/or other review methods like email, wikis, etc.

ConceptShare was highly recommended to us by our website design company Indez. We trusted their recommendation and haven’t looked back since.

How have your processes changed since implementing ConceptShare?

Our website is quite heavily graphic based; we change banners regularly to reflect new promotions etc which requires consultation from several different people in multiple countries. The processes have become increasingly efficient and the graphic design team have doubled their workload as a result.

What is the most valuable ConceptShare feature for your workflow?

We all take this for granted these days but the fact that all feedback comments are easily accessible and can be actioned in real time is infinitely valuable. It’s basic but it lays the foundation for impressively efficient workflow.

Are there any features you would like to see in ConceptShare that aren’t there now?

Live real time conferencing with interactive video chat. The possibilities would be limitless with this functionality.

If you were at a cocktail party and met your twin who had never heard of ConceptShare, how would you explain it to them?

To be brutally honest I would likely be so steaming that I wouldn’t even recognise my own twin. On top of that our mother would have a lot of explaining to do regarding why we were separated at birth etc so the topic of conceptshare would be quite far down the list! Joking aside, I would say Conceptshare empowers all parties to action detailed and minute feedback changes effectively to achieve top quality visual results. Now back to the party… 2 Mojitos please barman!

Did you know that 100% of people that review creative work using email hate reviewing creative work using email? We initially thought that sounded like something marketing would make up, but then we took a walk in an email reviewer’s shoes for a day, and we noticed some problems:

Creative Review by Email is Like Abstract Art

Abstract art is interpreted differently by everyone who sees it; which is great for art, but not so much for reviews on your marketing campaigns and other creative work;

Email eliminates context because the feedback is referring to a visual asset that is either stuck in an attachment or got dropped three replies ago;

Everyone involved in the review has to try and decipher what Bob is saying when he says move the button a bit over to the left (which button, how much over to the left); everyone will have their own interpretation è forcing you to have to be a group translator to and get everyone on the same page.

0 to Chaos in 2 Replies

Reviews usually involve receiving feedback from more than 1 person;

As soon as that second “reply to all” thread hits your inbox there are probably multiple points of feedback: Bob is talking about changing blue to green, Linda is talking about changing the copy, Susan is talking about how she would prefer rounded corners to square corners -> you have to try keep up with who is saying what;

People are not good at keeping threads consistent. We’re all guilty of this, but one “reply” instead of “reply all” makes for a confused group of reviewers. Somewhere along the way the review thread branches and you have the “Bob, Linda and Susan” thread + the “Bob” thread + “Susan” thread + “Linda” thread ->you now have multiple streams of feedback coming into your inbox and you need to keep on top of it, collate the feedback and get everyone on the same page.

Versions: The Laurel & Hardy Routine

No matter how old you are at some point you have heard a ‘who is on first’ routine that was made famous by Laurel and Hardy;

Creative review by email is sort of like that as well; especially when it comes to which version is on deck to be reviewed. What usually happens is that Linda is good at keeping her inbox tidy so she finds and reviews the latest version of the file (lets say its Version 4). Unfortunately Bob and Susan are like most of us and their inbox is usually the digital equivalent of a teenager’s room (big, bad mess);

And they open up an email with an attachment from two versions ago (Version 2) and start reviewing something that has already been reviewed and that you have moved past. Not a productive use of time for them, you and the other people involved in the review.

But Is ConceptShare Any Better?

We think so. Just like one of those simulated games (1942 Yankees vs. 2001 Yankees) or boxing match (Muhammad Ali vs. Mike Tyson) we pitted Email against ConceptShare. We think we come out on top, but ultimately your opinion counts more than ours. You tell us in the comments whether or not you think ConceptShare beats out Email as a better creative review tool:

We checked with the judges, and their official ruling is that ConceptShare won in the first round by TKO, making it an easy victory over an old favourite of a lot of creative teams.

This is just the beginning, though. We’re taking on all of the classic ways of reviewing creative work, and showing you how ConceptShare can make reviewing creative work a lot easier. And remember – you tell us what you think by leaving us a comment.

The modern production line

What does Toyota’s manufacturing process and creative review have to do with each other? More than you may think. We began this series with a list of the big trends we see affecting the creative teams, organizations and industries. And more to the point – how those trends are making smarter creative review processes a must have for any creative team that is focused on delivering content and products that have an impact.

Today, we’re going to focus on just one trend – just in time asset production. This is a term we borrowed from the manufacturing industry, but it’s increasingly becoming representative of how creative content and digital assets are being produced.

The Just In Time Production Process

If you’re not familiar with just in time production, it’s a manufacturing process that’s all about skillfully coordinating production of all of the components required for a final product – across teams, expertise, locations and time zones.

Go team!

The process relies on components being delivered just in time so that the manufacturing process continues to move towards the output of a final product; the proverbial finish line. It’s like an Olympic relay team – everything has to work together, and with one slip of the baton the entire team is out, done and finished. They lose the race, the prize, and the glory all in one easy fall.

For example, if you’re building a car, it means each part required to build the car is brought into the factory just in time to be installed. If one part doesn’t make it in time, the whole process falls apart, leading to delays, cost overruns, and a production line that isn’t operating at its full potential capacity.

Thanks for the manufacturing lesson. What does this have to do with me?

I know what you’re thinking: we produce marketing campaigns, games, or other types of creative work – not cars! Why would we need to apply a rigid manufacturing process to how we produce assets? Well, 10 years ago, that was true. The production of the prevalent assets of that time were usually produced by 1 person (or a very small group) who were usually sitting together in the same office.

Today, not so much. Stick with me for a couple more paragraphs and I’ll tell you how 3 trends that brought just in time production to the manufacturing world are starting to bring just in time asset production to the world of creative teams, organizations and industries:

Production happens across multiple expertise

Building a Model T – one piece at a time

Back when Mr. Ford started pumping out his Model Ts all of the expertise was in the same facility. The same guys who built the engine built all of the other parts. Soon the car industry started to distribute manufacturing of individual components to points of manufacturing expertise. Today there are hundreds of manufacturers that contribute parts to the development of a single car. It works and it’s a necessity because gone are the days when one company (or one individual) could be experts and “best in class” of all things.

It’s the same with most every physical product today. That iPhone that you might be reading this on? The glass screen from Corning, the chip from Samsung (ironically), parts from other companies and locations. All of it shipped to Foxconn in China where your phone is put together and sent to your local Apple store or drop shipped direct to your front door 48 hours after you ordered it. This is because Apple has the best in class expertise and manufacturing coordinated across multiple companies and expertise.

Just like in the car manufacturing world, asset production isn’t a one person task, either. It takes the collaborative efforts of people with different expertise. For example, 10 years ago or even 5 years ago if you had to develop a website there was usually 1 person (lets call him Bob) that would get it done. Over time, as assets have become more complex and designed to deliver richer experiences, Bob no longer has all of the necessary skills to deliver the asset on his own.  Bob is now working with multiple experts – UI/UX, designers, developers, QA, etc. – each who bring a different expertise to the process. It takes a diverse team, each with different skills, working in lockstep to deliver a quality product.

For that team of experts to be able to effectively work in lockstep to deliver a single product (i.e. a website) the creative review process has become more important. They need to be able to effectively collaborate and provide clear and actionable feedback to each other through each phase of a project.

Without a smart creative review process the team of experts will not be able to work as a single, coordinating unit focused on delivering the best possible final product.

Production happens across multiple locations

While building a Corolla, Toyota has teams all over the world building chassis, frames, doors, and other parts required to manufacture the car. The teams don’t see each other, they’ve never met, but they are working in lockstep. The plant in Tupelo expects that parts from all around the world are going to arrive on time so that the manufacturing line keeps running and producing cars on schedule. If the company that produces something as small as the brake lights is delayed in getting their parts to Tupelo, it then causes the whole line comes to a standstill.

Welcome to creative production in 2012. Gone are the days where everyone you ever had to interact with at work sat within a 20 second walk. Today, teams are spread amongst multiple time zones, locations, and even companies (for more info on outsourcing, read our Outsourcing ROI post). This means that all of the pieces of an asset are being “manufactured” everywhere in the world, and then being “assembled” at a final, central location.

Just like the plant in Detroit, if a single component doesn’t show up when it is expected then the whole production of your campaign, game or other creative work is at risk. Again, requiring the need for smarter creative review processes. It is not the only thing that matter in today’s distributed asset production environment. However, it is important. Without a smart process you risk assets not being reviewed on time and you risk assets showing up that are “wrong”. Either of which will bring your assembly line to a grinding halt.

Virtual Team; Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

The virtual team is the new reality for the creative world. Just like teams on the distributed manufacturing line that assemble and disband for different projects, creative teams are doing the same.

As outsourcing and freelancers become a bigger part of a creative team’s talent, the virtual team will increasingly become the go-to method for asset production. Teams assemble a collection of in-house talent, freelancers and outsourcers – all working together to build assets as fast as possible. The just in time production process is becoming standard operating practice amongst these teams to effectively collaborate right out of the gate without the benefit of knowing each other for a long period of time. They work towards the ultimate goal of being able to deliver against projects on time and on spec to fit into the just in time production process.

What does this mean for my Creative Review process?

It means a lot. Just like a missing part can halt Toyota’s assembly line, a missing asset can halt the creative manufacturing process. Or worse yet an asset shows up doesn’t meet the spec. These are problems that are often created by a poor creative review process. It could be that the process is not well defined; maybe the right tools are not in place to effectively initiate coordinate and track creative reviews; maybe the review process doesn’t produce clear and actionable input.

The bottom line is that in today’s world of distributed asset production it’s time for creative teams, organizations and industries to borrow from their manufacturing cousins. They long ago implemented processes and systems to support distributed production assembly lines. They can now access and take advantage of expertise regardless of location or time zone, knowing that the finished product will roll off the assembly line on spec and on time.

Its time for creative teams to step up, implement smarter creative processes and take advantage of a distributed manufacturing production environment. Your ability to access talent, expertise and deliver projects on time and on spec depends on it.

Agree or Disagree? Please leave us a comment and continue the discussion with us.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at how the 24/7 production cycle is having a big effect on the creative space. Look for that on our blog next week.

1. It highlights the breadth of what ConceptShare can do;
2. Our Design team storyboarded and shot this video themselves;
3. We used ConceptShare to capture and communicate feedback between Design, Marketing and other team members to help create the final product.

Watch this video, and discover ConceptShare in 3 minutes:

We invest a lot of time in learning from our clients because through knowing and understanding we can deliver a better product. Not just features, but a solution that will allow them to streamline their creative review processes and move assets through the production cycle as quickly as possible, producing significant productivity benefits that flow to their bottom lines.

Keeping up on trends is important

As we have learned more from our customers we have identified a number of business realities and industry trends that are amplifying the need for smarter creative review processes. These are realities and trends that we see impacting customers across a range of industries from Digital Agencies to Game Studios to Global 2000 Marketing Departments to the Internet Retailer 500.

In this new ongoing blog series – Business Realities, Industry Trends and the Rise of Creative Review Workflow – we want to initiate a discussion with marketers, designers, traffic managers and creative operations executives on topics such as:

Just In Time Assets Production: assets are being developed by a combination of in-house teams, outsourcers and artists distributed across locations and time zones. This has caused the production environment to start to resemble a complex manufacturing environment. Where campaigns and projects come to a screeching halt if assets don’t show up at the right time and according to spec.

Outsourcing: the dual pursuit of talent and lower production costs has been met by the exploding growth of outsourcing. To in-house service bureaus, freelancer networks and 3^rd party studios. Where the production of campaigns and projects is increasingly coordinated and delivered through distributed teams.

The 24/7 Production Cycle: outsourcing on a global scale and the fact that competition for customers, markets and dollars is a 24/7 game has led to the rise of the 24/7 production cycle. Where work on campaigns and projects is handed off from team to team with the same mindset of an Olympic relay team; get to the finish line as quickly as possible! With the added difficulty of having to hand the baton off across locations, time zones and languages

Increased Volume of Assets: a company’s customer market is defined by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of segments who are being targeted through multiple channels. Leading to a significant increase in the volume of assets that need to be produced in a 24/7 production environment.

The Economics of Asset Production & The CFO Marketer/Creative Director: The general business environment and all of the trends listed above are merging so that spreadsheets, ROI and other terms usually reserved for CFO locker room talk are now part of the marketer’s and creative director’s daily vocabulary. These individuals are increasingly looking (or being asked to look) at the cost of asset production, ROAR (Return on Asset Resources) and other metrics that are directly tied to getting more assets out the door as quickly as possible.

We’ll include other topics as during this series as we explore these trends in detail; share what we are seeing and where we see things going. We’ll offer our point of view on how we think these trends are and will impact your organization.

We invite you to join the discussion and share how these realities and trends are impacting you and your team and the steps you are taking to address them.

Look for our first post on Just-In-Time production coming next week.

First up is Ghost Productions, a medical animation studio that produce anatomically accurate and visually striking 3D medical imagery. They use ConceptShare to power their Poltergeist Client Media Server, which is a one-stop location for the Ghost Productions team and clients to access project assets, review assets using markups and threaded discussions, and speed up the approval process. Even though they’ve been using ConceptShare for less than 3 months,  it has already become an integral part of their creative workflow.

Medical animation is very useful for marketing, training and education because it gets right to the point, clearly and quickly without showing anything you don’t want the audience to see. It provides a new and innovative way to produce medical videos that explain complex medical information to a wider audience. Stephan Kuslich is the founder and executive producer at Ghost Productions, and he answered some questions for us about his company, and how they use ConceptShare:

Tell us a little about yourself and your company.

Ghost Productions, Inc. is a medical animation studio that uses the most sophisticated 3D technology to explain complex surgery, anatomy, and physiology to audiences of all levels of understanding around the globe.

Our goal is to provide our clients with content that brings exceptional value to their companies and products. Ghost Productions has remained successful largely due to our ability to help our clients increase their wealth. The vast majority of our total earnings comes from return customers who got results last time they hired us to produce content. When we give you a proposal, we’re doing our best to create solutions that will make you more successful because in the long run, we’re really in this together. We view every project as an investment in our clients as well as our future.

What kind of assets do you produce?

Everything from 3D animated videos and stereoscopic movies to computer rendered medical illustrations and interactive presentations. You can see some examples here.

In your pre-ConceptShare days, how did you review your creative work?

It was guess work. We spent a lot of time talking with clients over the phone trying to get it right with technology that was rarely more advanced than hand puppets.

What was the single biggest pain point pre-ConceptShare?

Before ConceptShare, we were going through too many revisions with clients because feedback wasn’t clear. Having clients make minute changes from revision to revision wasted countless hours we could use for other activities.

Why did you choose to use ConceptShare over competitors and/or other review methods like email, wikis, etc. 

Simplicity! ConceptShare allowed a powerful method of collaborating with clients without spending any time training them. This made it easy for them and us. Clients like to use it too. They enjoy logging in and seeing our changes and new updates and giving their direction. It felt like pulling teeth getting them to use other systems.

How have your processes changed since implementing ConceptShare?

We’re faster and we’re able to make bigger promises without losing our shirts. We feel more confident that we can offer more “Done Right or Done Over” guarantees with our work because ConceptShare is keeping track of the revision for us. When a client starts scope creeping the project into a bad zone, we can reference all the assets from the scrip to shot-list, to storyboard to animated drafts in one place and we can all see what the client had approved each step along the way.

What are the 3 most valuable ConceptShare features for your workflow?

1. Making frame accurate comments at a particular time while reviewing video;
2. Using markups to communicate and capture clear and actionable feedback on any/all assets to illustrate a point;
3. Easily initiating and tracking approval processes with clients

Are there any features you would like to see in ConceptShare that aren’t there now?

1. The ability to approve individual comments/markups as opposed to just an entire asset.
2. Tasks – for both clients and producers
3. Easy approval check marks for clients so they could approve multiple changes in one revision while making notes on others. A less of an ALL or nothing system than the current method.
4. Secrets/Whispers – so we can say things to each other while hiding comments from clients
5. Ability to turn off ConceptShare email notifications and send our own (easily)

(FYI from ConceptShare – many of these feature requests are already planned for implementation over the next 60 days, and we’ll be letting everyone know when they’re available)

If you were at a cocktail party and met your twin who had never heard of ConceptShare, how would you explain it to them? 

ConceptShare is easiest way for us to show our clients our progress and the easiest way for them to give us feedback and request changes. ConceptShare really does make our clients the directors of their content more so than any other system we’ve seen.

Thanks, Stephan! Ghost Productions also use their abilities in video production to make great training videos to help their clients jump right into ConceptShare, which you can see here. If you want to learn more about Ghost Productions, you can contact them to learn more about what they do and how they can help you.

Interested in being a featured customer on the ConceptShare blog? Just let me know in the comments, or by emailing matthew.kelly AT conceptshare.com[sbpro-button type="2" url="https://www.facebook.com/ConceptShare" facebook_theme="light" facebook_layout="button_count" showfaces="false"]

What is your role at ConceptShare?

At ConceptShare I’m a Senior Developer primarily heading up the backend technologies that drive ConceptShare.  My duties cover a wide range of functional areas relating to the ConceptShare application such as the ConceptShare API, Integrations, Queue Services, On-Premise Installations and Database Administrator to name a few.

Furthermore, I also provide integration support for our other backend systems such our internal integrations with our billing, CRM, and support systems.

What is your background before joining ConceptShare?

Computers have always been an important part of my family, with both of my older brothers having careers in the computing field. Because of this, I have been dabbling with computers since a very young age. In fact, I received my first computer support call in my Grade 2 class. On my report card that year, my teacher actually thanked me for helping her out with the computer and computer related issues during the school year.

I went to Laurentian University and graduated with an Honours B.Sc in Computer Science in 2003. While in school, I worked as a computer technician, and moved into an IT Manager role for a local electronics retailer.

After graduating I found a position as an Application Developer for a company creating Enterprise software (particularly intranets).  It was at this position that Bernie found me and decided I would be a perfect addition to the CS Team which was going through a large spike in development requirement at the time. I joined in 2008 and never looked back.

When you’re not at ConceptShare, where would someone find you? 

When I’m not at ConceptShare you can primarily find me in one of two places, at home with the wife and two kids, or at the local Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club.  I joined the club back in early 2008, and since then when I’m not training, I’m typically helping out teaching the adult and the kids classes.

Do you have a favorite type of technology?

I love technology where people have taken some piece of hardware and modified it in some way, integrated it, to produce some tool that needs to fit their needs.  Typically these are hobby type projects but re-purposing existing tech. to make new tech I always find fascinating.

If you could be any of ConceptShare’s annotation tools, what would you be and why?

My first gut response would be the pointer (arrow) tool, simply because I tend to get straight to the issue at hand and quickly find resolutions and move forward.  However, after mulling that one over I would have to go with the pen tool.  Arrows are great but they don’t allow you to express much beyond the straight path to the solution.  If I was a pen on the other hand, I have the ability to use my artistic and creative mind to architect solutions and allow for greater brainstorming.