Screencasts (aka screen capture movies)

Screen capture movie software (the “screencast” recorder) has been around for at least a decade. In essence, screencast recorders are virtual computer-screen camcorders. You install them and let them run in the background. When you want to record your onscreen activity, you press ‘record’ (usually a hotkey) and continue working. When you’re finished, you press ‘stop’ (another hotkey) and a full-motion movie of your activity is stored to disk. If you wish, you can record sound as well, most likely in the form of a running commentary spoken into the PC’s microphone. While there are many screencast programs on the market, iPOV has had good experience with the stability and value offered by BBFlashback and the features and performance of Camtasia.

Public screencast examples are everywhere. YouTube is full of them. So, wouldn’t you expect to see widespread use in large companies and organizations for internal IT training? That just seems to be starting. I suspect that there are at least 4 contributing reasons why it doesn’t seem to be as common as we would expect:

• Lack of Awareness – Screencast software is a surprising well-kept secret. We can’t count the number of times that we have spoken to programmers, program managers, and CIOs that don’t know even they exist. If we point them to examples on YouTube, they say: “I wondered how that was done”.
• Camera Shyness – It takes a certain amount of guts to record a movie that has your voice on it. What if you misspeak? What if you have a squeaky voice? What if you have a thick accent? All sorts of things can go wrong that will make you more nervous. Then you will make more mistakes and get even more nervous. Then you will give up.
• Lack of searchability – It takes time to demonstrate a complex software operation. Ten, twenty or thirty minutes is not uncommon. How many potential users have the patience to watch that much video to get an answer to a question? The problem is not getting to the right spot (most screencasts have tracker bars), the problem is knowing there is a right spot to get to. If only you could search the screencasts the way you search Google.
• No place to store them – Screencast movie files have gotten a lot smaller – but many are still too big to attach to corporate emails. That means that you need to put them on a web server or CD. If you accumulate a large collection, you will be talking gigabytes. Then how do you move them or find them. That brings us back to the searchability concern.

Until someone finds a way to overcome these issues, they will unfairly delay the adoption of this powerful and exciting technology.

Some Links with ideas:

• BB Flashback (free recorder and/or commercial editor)
• Techsmith Camtasia Studio (commercial recorder and editor)
• Jing (free recorder, but limited to 5 min run time)
• Screencast Software Comparison

Dual Monitor

With dual monitor support, you can hook up a second monitor and expand your laptop or desktop to double its size. This will give you enough screen real estate to support two applications that are fully open and functional. The application to the problem statement at the start of this diary should be obvious. With two monitors, you can open your application on one screen and the help window on the other. You can copy and paste from one to the other in one quick motion. You can read instructions in the help file as you follow them in the application.

Every notebook computer built in the past 5 years has built-in support for an external monitor. For desktop computers, you may have to add an inexpensive video card and a second monitor. The total one-time cost is typically less than $150 per seat. The return on that investment for a learner will be huge. Nonetheless, this capability is just starting to get the attention it deserves. You will find dual monitor setups in many software development shops and especially on trading floors, but not in most ordinary offices. Since there is no obvious drawback, it seems to be mainly an issue of awareness – and occasionally bureaucracy. One large company told me that all their IT support was outsourced to a 3rd party computer services firm. The service firm charged $100 per month for each monitor that it deployed!

Nevermind.

If, however, the PTB (powers that be) allow you to experiment with ways to achieve much higher productivity at a minimal cost, here are some additional tools and articles with more ideas for multiple monitors:

• Five Free Tools
• MultiMonitor FAQ
• Multi-Screens (banks of monitors)

• The edits are destructive – Most editing operations actually change video source. As the producer makes one edit after another, they create a complex trail of changes that is hard to reverse. If, for example, they complete the editing of a video clip and someone spots a flaw, the producer may have to go back to the beginning and repeat all of their work.
• Edits are made early in the development cycle – Since the edits are destructive, there is strong pressure to make them up front, get the video right, then proceed from there. Unfortunately, this means that if later work requires a change in the video, the work has to be repeated almost from scratch.

iPOV’s approach is totally different. iPOV can, of course, apply any of the familiar destructive editing technologies. If you want special effects on your video, we can add them. However, iPOV has developed a unique set of standard transformations that are inherently non-destructive. Applied in combination, our transformations can totally alter the appearance and content of the source video. As a bonus, our work is easily reversible up to the end of the development process and beyond. This makes maintenance easier and less costly. iPOV’s standard transformations fall into two main categories: visual transformations and content transformations that can be combined to create an amazing range of finished effects. The content transformations will be the subject of another blog entry. This one focuses on the challenge of visual transformation.

Visual Transformations

iPOV’s visual transformations are designed to alter the visual structure and appearance of a video source. They do some of the operations that are normally associated with high-quality commercial software. However, iPOV’s approach is totally different. iPOV has developed a powerful CoSolvent Flash Player (CFP) that does two transformations. Together, these can virtually slice, merge, reorder, overlay, insert, hide, zoom, slow, accelerate or freeze action – without altering the original video clips. The CFP runs in the Adobe Flash Player that is in the end-user’s web browser. In other words, the CFP applies the transformations as the movie is being downloaded to the web page. That’s as late in the development cycle as we could manage.

Transformation	iPOV Technology	iPOV Service	Goals
Construction	The CFP is a Flash application that assembles, orders, and plays a set of Flash movie clips in any sequence or timing on a virtual timeline. All of the action is driven from external XML specification files.	iPOV staff craft the XML spec files to client preferences for: Choice of sub-movies Order of components Component timings Inserted animations	The goal is to take all of the good bits and pieces from a set of raw movies and Flash raw materials and dynamically assemble them into a pleasing, seamless movie.
Enhancement	The CFP listens for commands from javascript or XML spec files. The commands can tell it to add subtitles, turn on a layer to mask a flaw, add symbols, or hide and reveal Flash animations and controls.	iPOV staff craft the source Flash files and XML spec files to: Add overlays Mask problems Add dynamic controls Highlight features	Apply the power of Flash layers to non-destructively change the appearance of the underlying constructed movie.

To be fair, a video producer, instructional designer or documentation author has lots of choices. There are excellent software and hardware products that do far more than iPOV’s transformations. However, commercial tools seldom consider overall project efficiency. To be efficient, you need to manage the visual changes from end to end:

• iPOV has defined formal procedures and guidelines for applying these visual transformations. With its procedures, iPOV can enforce consistency across long video clips or across all of the clips in a large collection.
• The spec files for the CFP can be revised throughout the content development life cycle and iPOV’s formal procedures enforce consistency across updates and revisions long after the initial authoring project is finished.

iPOV is very excited about the long-term potential for non-destructive transformations. Our CFP is just beginning its journey. There are many potential applications that we haven’t had time to explore and we are very eager to speak with potential clients that might be want to explore them with us. For example, we know that we could program a server to rewrite the XML spec files dynamically to reflect viewer profiles. That means that two website visitors might see totally different ‘mashups’ that are tailored precisely to their personal needs. The resulting mashups will each appear to play as a seamless movie. How many potential applications are there for that capability? If you have one, please contact us so we can discuss it.

You customized an ERP module with 15 new fields, 4 new screens, 5 significantly changed screens, a significantly different workflow, and an updated graphics ‘theme’. It takes you about 30 min just to walk a co-worker through all of the new features and methods. Now, you’re tasked to deliver end-user documentation and training materials ASAP. Your options are:

1. Open Snagit, grab lots of screen shots and start writing a Word manual – you should have it ready in a week or so.
2. Give it to the tech writers – they’ll pester you with questions, but they might have it done in a couple of weeks
3. Write a quickie memo and email it to end-users and let them figure it out for themselves – eventually.
4. Spend 1 or 2 hours on the problem and deploy it in multiple, professional formats a week from now.

The Typical Knowledge Asset Life Cycle

There’s an old management maxim: You must manage around your scarcest resource. For many (probably most) technology-intensive companies, the on-task time of their critical experts is a perennial “scarcest resource”. Despite that, companies routinely assign high-value talents to routine, mundane work – because they are the only people that can do the task. Nowhere is this waste more evident than in the production of “knowledge assets” like presentations, courseware, technical manuals, and operator guides. High-priced engineers work long hours with high-priced technical writers in one of the most inefficient processes in all of business. Worse, everyone hates doing it. If there is an engineer that loves writing manuals, no one at iPOV has ever met him or her. Yet they must do it because end-users need what they know. Under the best scenario, the task described above might go as well as is shown in this calendar:

If the participants are typical, however, the task will take much longer. The developer will be pulled onto other problems and won’t be able to write in a continuous effort. It may be a couple of weeks before the developer can finish the first draft. Then it will take time to schedule the reviews. Then more time to schedule an independent tester to verify that the procedures will work as written. Then the material has to be formatted and integrated into a document that meets the standards and is suitable for deployment. A task that might optimally be done in a week or two can easily stretch out for months. Finally, you could dump it all on a tech writer or outsource service. Let someone else figure things out from the finished application. Someone will still need to manage, review and validate their work. Hopefully they won’t pester the developer with too many questions.

What if there were a solution to this problem that was inherently fast, efficient and accurate? What if that solution made almost no demands on the developer’s time? What if the outputs were easily packaged in a wide range of deliverable forms: eLearning, manuals, class presentation materials, reference guides? What if the solution was less expensive than any method currently in use – even competitive with outsourcing to low-wage countries? What if the process was simple and incredibly easy to follow? What if that process was intelligent, culturally savvy and adaptable and would make the developer look really smart and competent? What if the developer could do everything he or she needed to do in a few hours after lunch, on a plane, in their hotel room on the road, or at home?

The Lean Knowledge Asset Life Cycle

iPOV has found a way to achieve the impossible. It just takes a total rethinking of the methodology – and a critical insight: The easiest way to write a software manual is to ask the developer to demonstrate the software and record the demonstration on video. With a thorough video demonstration, the developer can be excused from most of the subsequent documentation production process. The demonstration needn’t be smooth or professional. It can have gaffes and minor mistakes (if they are immediately corrected). The sound can be poor. A co-worker can knock on the door and interrupt the session. All of that is OK. There are only two things that are absolutely essential:

• A clear recording of the entire computer desktop and the developer’s commentary
• A thorough explanation of the topic details.

The first requirement is easy to meet with the latest generation of screencasting software (also see this blog article summary). Programs like camtasia and BBFlashback make this process simple and nearly foolproof. Install a standard Windows program and let it run in the background. The second requirement is met if the developer plugs a microphone into the PC and gives a running commentary to the video recording. The audio quality or the speech clarity is largely irrelevant. It’s purpose is just to record the developer’s thoughts. Flubs and gaffes and misstatements are not important. When these two requirements are met, the scenario in the problem statement can be satisfied with the following process:

In this process, the software developer’s only job is to share their knowledge on the video/audio recording. With no need to worry about minor mistakes, most people can learn to produce useful video in one or two takes. iPOV will take the recording and apply several transformations, most likely the construction, restatement, and possibly the extraction transformations. With these, iPOV can generate polished, professional eLearning and documentation materials that closely reflect the developer’s original intent. After the initial planning and recording sessions, the developer will only need to be involved in a review process about halfway through the process. At this point, the developer can edit the draft script to reflect what they would really like to have said.

Developer involvement is mostly independent of the content. The only exception is for recordings that rely on PowerPoint presentations or other forms of graphical documentation (e.g, UML diagrams). Preparation takes time – but that is true regardless of the recording method. At each stage, iPOV’s process generates interim deliverables that have an intrinsic value. In a crisis, the original developer recordings can be sent immediately. Whatever their faults, they are better than nothing. The review draft will have a script that has undergone significant grammar review and improvement. The final output is generally a SCORM-compliant learning object that is suitable for referencing in an online document or inclusion in courseware in an LMS. Other materials can be derived from this, including foreign language and print versions.

Bottom Line

In over 350 projects, iPOV has proven that this new method really works. iPOV has taken 5 hours of developer recordings and turned them into 5 hours of finished, validated eLearning materials in less than 3 weeks – start to finish. The developer’s time commitment was about 3 days! The rest of the time, the developers were busy getting the software system ready for deployment.

Why waste the time of the organization’s scarcest resource. Why put corporate initiatives in jeopardy by sidetracking your experts on mundane documentation? Why put projects in jeopardy by failing to distribute the documentation that end-users need? It simply is unnecessary.

Remember the last time a manual told you to press a button and nothing
happened? So you spend fifteen minutes on the phone waiting for
customer service, and then you’re told you just have to press it past
where it starts giving pressure, but you were too afraid you’d break
it? These are details it’s almost impossible to capture with simple
text.

The Old Standby

Everyone uses work instructions. Some are called ‘standard
operating procedures’. Others are ISO9001 or regulatory compliance procedures. Some are safety
procedures. Some are software transaction guidelines. Some are … well
almost anything. Most work instructions follow an established
formula:

Work instructions have been around for at least a century and probably a lot longer. Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth popularized them as a means to implement the “one best way” to do any task. While they can be written in a myriad of ways, they generally include a procedural guide: Introduction. Steps in procedure: Step 1 Step 2 … End Test Release and repeat At iPOV, we tend to see these documents as the “sheet music” of routine industrial activity. They make the tasks definable, repeatable, and capable of controlled change. But how are these procedures understood? Can the reader relate them to the task at hand or do they have to spend time puzzling over them? Or worse, being afraid to follow them?

Where Text Fails and Video Succeeds

Most of the time, written instructions are clear, but there are common situations where a written, step-by-step procedure is clearly inadequate. While purists may believe that any task can be described by a well-written procedure, we have seen many situations where the task is very difficult or impossible to reduce to a text and image work instruction. We offer the following video examples as evidence:

Example (click thumbnail)	Instructional Challenge
Link to download pdf version of document.	How do you show the rhythm of the task? The whole point of this instruction is to do this task much faster than most people believe possible. To achieve that speed requires two things: You must do the correct steps You must do them at a fast, smooth rhythm The inherent rhythm is a critical part of the expertise. In fact, achieving a smooth rhythm is how you know that you are good at the task. So how can you learn rhythm from a written work instruction? That’s hard. A short video clip, however, gives a clear and compelling sense of the correct rhythm. When a worker can do the task with a similarly fast, fluid motion, they know they are qualified for the task. This is the same confidence they will get with OJT from an expert. Except the video doesn’t draw wages. (credit: the text portion of the worksheet was developed by Bryan Lund at the Training Within Industry Blog)
	How do you know how hard to push? The human brain is a marvelous estimator of physical actions. When you watch the technician push the ribbon on with two fingers and see that the tendons in the back of his hand barely quiver, your brain automatically judges how much force he is using. Most people can almost ‘feel’ the amount of pressure that he is exerting. Only two things could accurately convey that knowledge: doing it yourself and, as a minimal substitute, a movie like this. There are physical tasks throughout industry that contain similar elements. Watching safety demonstrations for lifting or washing will reveal the same valuable, subtle physical clues. Clues that will only be available from a live demonstration or a video clip like this.
	How do you show things that can’t be seen? A camera can go places that are too difficult or dangerous or complicated for the human viewer. You can make a drawing of these places, but you can’t watch things happen. A camera can also go places and see things that hard for the brain to directly comprehend: It can make fast events visible with slow motion It can make slow things less tedious with time-lapse It can see things that are really small or really large It can view action from several angles simultaneously It can see where there is very little light It can go where a human would not dare etc. You can try to write text and graphic descriptions of these phenomena – but to what end? They will tax the imagination of the reader. You can create computer simulations, but how much will it cost and how long will it take? A little bit of inexpensive camera work may do just as well and will be far more believable.
	How do you demonstrate artistry? As technology invades more and more of our professional tasks, it brings a level of complexity and sophistication that is very difficult to explain. In todays’ offices, for example, skill at PowerPoint is nearly as essential as skill with a file was for early manufacturing workers. Except that PowerPoint skills are more varied and difficult to describe. This example from YouTube shows how to create a glassy sphere in Photoshop. That is almost a basic skill for budding web designers. Yet it is totally beyond the ability of text and graphics to describe. Imagine a printed work instruction like the ones at the top of this article. It would be ridiculous. The movie at left, while a bit amateurish, is perfectly clear, straightforward and effective. The required actions are shown, together with the vocalized thoughts of the artist. You quickly understand what you need to do and why you need to do it.

Bottom Line: Video is Industrial Mind Music

A few people can read sheet music and visualize the melody. Most of us cannot. We have to hear it being played. As tasks in our technological world become more sophisticated and demanding, it is not enough to hand sheet music (text and image work instructions) to our workforce. We should be sensitive to the situations where the task is complex, rhythmic, mysterious or artistic and use video-based work instructions instead. iPOV proves every day that those instructions don’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. They just have to show it like it is. It’s only fair to our workforce and our bottom line.

“We are trying to get traction for it as a service for what I believe to be a very badly underserved userspace: the no-man’s-land between people inside a corporate firewall and a closed community of stakeholders.”

Tony’s response, quite rightly, was to question my sanity. Of course, he was very polite about it:

“On the community side of things – I guess I’m surprised you say it’s underserved. My impression is there are lots of solutions, e.g., Ning.”

Umm. Yes.  Tony’s right. There are lots of solutions. I’ve had active accounts on Ning for at least 18 months and I went through the feature checklist. Technically, Ning will do most of the things that our CoSolvent Community Server can do, plus quite a few more. Other social networking tools are similar. Does that mean we’ve wasted two years on CoSolvent’s evolution? After a short recovery period, I realized that we developed CoSolvent around a set of assumptions and design concepts that we have not fully articulated – possibly even to ourselves. Now seems as good a time as any to set the record straight.

We designed CoSolvent Community Server (CCS) for business-oriented networking and video-sharing:

• We adopted a Windows folder operating metaphor that was as simple as possible so busy professionals could learn to use it.
• We designed CCS to operate with minimal hardware and software support because business networks need to reach all of the relevant stakeholders.
• We installed a rich underpinning of access controls, permissions and utilities so CCS can be molded to make workflows fluid and easy.

In many ways, CCS is like a box of Lego. The building blocks are individually simple, but they can be re-arranged to support a variety of practical business workflows.

What sort of ‘work’ network are we talking about?

We developed CoSolvent because we couldn’t find a reliable way move rich media (typically video) to and from the individual subject matter experts (SMEs) and managers among our various corporate training clients. Many of our corporate counterparts are not high-skill IT managers or experienced media folks. They are department managers, plant engineers, technicians and HR managers in big, security-conscious companies. They don’t have super-duper IT administrator privileges. They sometimes can’t even view YouTube. Yet, they’re the subject matter experts that we needed to share stuff with.

Our network collaborators are not really friends or social acquaintances. They are buyers and we are the vendor. It’s not about being social, its about the work. The work is the center of our network universe.

We needed a pragmatic tool for ‘work’ networking, not an engaging site for a ‘social’ networking.

Of course, if an existing social networking tool could double as a reasonable ‘work networking’ platform, we could avoid reinventing the wheel. If we could make Facebook or Ning, etc. do the job, that would be good enough. Unfortunately, there were a number of issues that gave us pause:

• The companies that employ our target audience strongly discourage employees from putting company assets on ‘public’ sites. If we wanted to use a Ning, we would have to convince their employer that it was safe. If we don’t control it and our client doesn’t control it, that’s a really tough sell to corporate IT.
• Workers often didn’t want their co-workers to see their materials until they had a chance to approve them. Can you put a video in Ning and ensure that only chosen co-workers (out of the larger community) can see it? Probably. Can you teach an IT-challenged manager how to do it and be sure that they won’t make a mistake? Can you make them feel confident that they won’t make a mistake? Not so easy.
• People often work with collections of related, but dissimilar materials. Most projects involve some video, some supporting text documents, possibly some audio files, some spreadsheets, etc. How could we keep those together and manage them in an orderly fashion in Ning or Facebook? We might do OK with Google Docs, but what about commenting and video handling?
• We wanted to accommodate all types of video as input. For example, there are scenarios where it is really convenient if our correspondents can upload and view SWF files. For security reasons, Ning, Facebook and Youtube will never let that happen because Flash animations can contain actionscript.
• It is hard to guarantee 100% access to a public social networking site – especially with IT-challenged users. The sponsors of Facebook or Ning don’t need 100% individual access for their sites to be successful. They engineer their software to make it as easy as possible, but ultimately they won’t care if a specific individual has an archaic browser or a vicious spam filter. However, if you want to network real work, 100% access is critical. If an individual can’t use the system, you must still do business. You will have to set up costly workarounds that can wipe out all of the productivity gains that the networking tool might offer.

If I try to frame our view of the contrasting demands in a diagrammatic form, it would look something like this:

A Social Network User participation is voluntary. People join because they gain something on an individual level – possibly for their career, but ultimately for their personal benefit. If, for any reason, a given individual user cannot fully participate, the server’s Sponsor may care – but not too much.	A Work Network A commercial Sponsor wants a safe, virtual space where all business stakeholders can participate – to do their job. A  ‘stakeholder community’ (e.g., a supply chain, an association, or a school) can span many individuals and organizations across the public Internet.

But the biggest problem:

A lot of real-world business ‘workflow’ isn’t person-centric.

Social networking tools are designed around the individual user. A user typically logs into ‘My Page’. From there, the user can engage other individuals, join groups of other individuals and share media with other individuals. They can form new clubs and groups with other individuals. However, at the end of the day, the individual is still the center of the universe.

Business interactions are often not about the individual. They may be more naturally expressed as company-to-company, department-to-company, project-to-consultant, or buyer-to-seller interactions. In fact, there can be any number of different central actors, some human and some organizational, in a working business network. Sure, you could start everything from the individual and build the structures for the other entities, but that is just the long way round. Why not establish a Lego-like structure that can be reconfigured to support the workflow directly?

There are lots of other issues and considerations, but we decided that we were looking at a problem that wasn’t really social. It was more pragmatic and utilitarian and commercial. We looked at a lot of possible solutions and finally decided to roll our own. We developed CoSolvent Community Server. There is a thorough technical description elsewhere on our website. However, Tony’s question reveals that our market positioning explanations are still not clear or adequate. So, until we can remedy the main site, let me try to summarize and clarify the concept of CCS:

• CCS is a web-based file sharing tool with a suite of extra features. Folders can be labeled anything the user wants. Any ‘social’ tools are slaved to the folder metaphor. For example, groups are formed by giving them defined permissions and their own folder structure.
• The Windows folder metaphor is easily customized to fit a wide variety of access schemes and workflows. The goal is flexibility and simplicity. We want to fully streamline the average worker’s collaborative experience – without adding extra navigation and structural complexity.
• It is designed to be maximally accessible by a wide range of users.  CCS works with minimal client-side requirements: low to modest bandwidth, web browser, and Flash. It has proven adept at reaching behind firewalls, to users  with Macs, to workers in other countries, etc. While CCS makes it easier, achieving 100% access will ultimately depend on the willingness of stakeholders, technical people, iPOV and community developers to work together.
• It is optimized for the exchange of video materials. The potential of video as a day-to-day business communication tool has barely been tapped. In the wild, video clips exist in a dizzying array of types and it is hard to share them without performing conversions and extra processing steps that most people don’t want to learn. CCS directly supports a wide variety of video types.
• It is designed to be quickly set up and hosted on a vanilla installations. Currently, all of our working installations are in Amazon’s EC2 electronic cloud. We can set up a new, totally dedicated, site in minutes, while piggy-backing on Amazon’s security infrastructure.

Another way to grasp the difference between CSS and a  typical social network is to look at some practical application scenarios.

Target Applications – Camera Based

Small, inexpensive, easy-to-use solid-state cameras burst on the scene 3 or 4 years ago. Examples include the Flip camera, the RCA SmallWonder, the Sanyo Xacti series and the Kodak Zi series, along with many, many, many others. That doesn’t even count the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone camera.  Surely there ought to be a way to apply these new tools in day-to-day business operations.

Scenario 1 – Confidential Quality Review

A corporate quality manager (CQM) uses CCS to get video reports of defects and problems from far-flung plants. Security is crucial. The CQM doesn’t want anyone (not even his VP) to see the videos before he has a chance to review and assess them. At the plant level, only the plant quality manager (PQM) is allowed to record and upload this type of video. We  can set up a folder arrangement in CCS as shown in the following diagram:

1. The PQM for Plant #5  makes a video (or possibly a still photo) of the problem. The PQM places the media in a special ‘defect report’ folder  that is visible only to the PQM
2. The ‘defect report’ folder is actually just a link to a real folder for Plant #5 that resides within the corporate quality area. That folder is visible only to the PQM and the CQM.
3. When the file arrives in the CQM’s Plant #5 folder, the CQM receives an automatic email notification that a defect report has arrived from Plant #5.

The CQM can take several actions. He/she can phone the Plant #5 PQM and discuss the problem. Having the video as a common talking point will likely speed discussion and resolution. The CQM can move the video file out of the hidden folder to the general area – possibly into a folder of known issues. If the CQM adds a comment with suggested remedies (or records and uploads a video), there is now a permanent record of the problem and the fix.

Scenario 2 – Getting Action from a Supplier

The receiving manager gets a shipment that is badly packaged. If he spends the next few days on the phone, he might get the supplier’s attention. CCS may be able to elicit a better response – if we set up folders so he can easily send a video to the supplier. One possible structure is illustrated in the following diagram:

1. The receiving manager spots a problem with the way a shipment is packaged. He/she records a short video to demonstrate and document the problem and uploads it to Supplier A’s ‘public folder’ on the CCS. The public folder is a special type of folder (designated with a yellow icon) that doesn’t require a login for any of the items that it contains.
2. The supervisor at Supplier A receives an email with a link to the video in the public folder. The supervisor just clicks the link to view the video.
3. The receiving manager follows up with a phone call to discuss the problem. Since both parties have viewed the video of the problem shipment, the issue is resolved quickly and decisively.

The ‘public’ folder is the key to this scenario. It allows the receiving manager to send the video safely without requiring that the supplier be registered in the system. The CCS public folder system is smart enough to only allow the viewer to see a) the item at the link they were given, or b) if they were given a link to a folder, they can see any items and subfolders that the linked folder contains. By giving the folder a distinctive (yellow) label, CCS makes it easy for occasional users to know where files are public and where they are private.

• You can view a ‘made-up’ example in this folder on our demo CCS.

Target Applications – Screencasting Based

CCS can be used with free software tools to rapidly generate document and media reviews. The tools we use most often are the following:

• BB Flashback Express – a free screencast recording program
• DemoHelper – a free program that draws on top of everything on the computer desktop (except that it automatically pauses running movies when you try to draw or write)

The basic idea behind the following examples is to make a screencast movie as you view and comment on documents or media in the CCS – then upload the movie of your commentary to CCS as a permanent record. With a little practice, this is much faster than trying to craft written comments – and typically much clearer.

Scenario 3 – Near-painless Media Review

We needed to get clients’ reviews of our work-in-process eLearning media. Client staff are busy and too-often unavailable. Plus they reside in a different city, so meetings are a chore. We can set up a folder structure with ‘Drop off’, ‘Review’, and ‘PickUp’ subfolders and show our clients how to use a free tool, BB Flashback Express, to record their comments. Now the review process goes like this:

1. We place the material for review in the client’s folder in the CCS.
2. We email the SME a link to the material that is up for review (or they get an automatic email notification if they have subscribed to the folder).
3. The SME starts BB Flashback Express to make a screencast of their review.
   • The reviewer opens the link to the viewable media and starts to watch.
   • Whenever they see something of note, they can pause the media, use their mouse to point out the feature and add a verbal commentary.
   • When they have finished their review, they can add any general comments, or cycle back through the media to add second thoughts.
4. The SME saves their screencast as a Flash file and upload it to CCS beside the media that was reviewed. They don’t even have to export their comments as Flash. They can just upload the raw BB Flashback file and we will replay it on our end. If there are any written materials (e.g., supplementary documents or comments), they can upload them or write them in the same folder as the reviewed material.

That’s it. We are finding that our clients can often review a 20 minute eLearning lesson in about half an hour. It takes us a bit longer to listen to their review, but there is seldom any confusion about their request. That means that our overall time investment is reduced. Win-Win.

Scenario 4 – Lightning Fast Essay Grading

I and several of my staff are currently teaching or have recently taught university-level courses where we had to grade student papers. Oh boy is that fun. However, we are trying a new approach. CCS can be configured so each registered user (aka student) gets their own private folder – just like any social networking tool:

1. We ask students to submit their papers as PDFs so we can view them directly online in CCS.
2. We automatically get an email when each file arrives.
3. We use BB Flashback and Demohelper to mark up the paper and record our verbal comments.
4. When we finish, we save the movie as an SWF and upload it into the student’s private folder beside their essay.

If the student followed our advice and ‘subscribed’ to their folder, they will receive an automatic email as soon as our comment video file has finished uploading. We can even log in with different browsers and upload a video in the background while we record the next video in the foreground. If we want to add text, say to suggest a rephrasing, we can cut, paste and edit text from the PDF to the CCS commenting utility. Bottom line, we can read, comment and grade an essay in just slightly longer than it would normally take to simply read the paper version. With 30, 50 or 60 students in a class, we like that idea. It gives a much better audit trail and, considering my atrocious chicken-scratch handwriting, the students probably learn more.

Scenario 5 – Commissioning Graphics at a Distance

We get our graphics done by a variety of designers. Some are local. Some work half a world away. However, iPOV often needs graphics done the same day or overnight. How can we do that with a designer in, say, Russia? An iPOV staff member typically records a short video to explain what they need. The camera arrangement is simple and cheap (under $250):

With this crude rig, we can record a 5-7 minute video to explain what we want. Even though we may be abysmal artists, we can make stick-figure drawings and explain our intent and requirements as we go. In a video, we can give far more context and rationale than we would ever have the patience  to put in a written specification. After the artist uploads a draft, we can comment in CCS. Sometimes we use BB Flashback Express and/or Demohelper to make a short screencast movie of our verbal comments – using the mouse as a pointer. That way the artist knows exactly which feature we are talking about. We can go back and forth several times in a day, although usually one or two cycles with the video comments are sufficient.

• You can view the sequence of a typical design process laid out in this folder on our CCS Demo site.

Summary

We designed CoSolvent Community Server for business-oriented networking and video-sharing. We adopted a Windows folder operating metaphor to make it as familiar as possible to the busy professionals that must learn to use it. We designed CCS to operate with minimal hardware and software support because business networks need to reach all of the relevant stakeholders. Finally, we added a rich underpinning of access controls, permissions and utilities so that we can mold CCS to make the workflows fluid and easy – especially for the tasks that make or save money for the sponsoring organization. In some ways, CCS is similar to a box of Lego. The building blocks are individually simple, but they can be re-arranged to support a variety of practical business workflows.

It’s possible that someone could customize Ning, or HiveLive, or SharePoint, or Google Docs, or … to work like CCS. However, we don’t think these tools were conceived for that purpose and it seems like it would be a force fit. I’m sure that others will pick up on the CCS idea and address this application space. Until then, we believe that our target market is still a bit ‘underserved’.

You have a new software package with more menus, tools, windows and recipes than you can count (e.g., Photoshop, SAP or Eclipse), but the learning curve is steep. You open help files, close help files, leaf through outdated books, and constantly switch from one window to another. You copy and paste snippets and commands and you always seem to lose your place. Arggh.

Three Underutilized Technologies

This diary explores three well-established technologies that are grossly underutilized in IT training. It will share some design solution ideas later in the diary, but let’s start with the technologies as they are currently being used.

Screencasts (aka screen capture movies)

Screen capture movie software (screencast recorder) has been around for at least a decade. In essence, screencast recorders are virtual computer-screen camcorders. You install them and let them run in the background. When you want to record your onscreen activity, you press ‘record’ (usually a hotkey) and continue working. When you’re finished, you press ‘stop’ (another hotkey) and a full-motion movie of your activity is stored to disk. If you wish, you can record sound as well, most likely in the form of a running commentary spoken into the PC’s microphone. While there are many screencast programs on the market, iPOV has had good experience with the value offered by BBFlashback (and its new v2.0 looks even more impressive).

Public screencast examples are everywhere. YouTube is full of them (e.g., here and here and here and …). So, wouldn’t you expect to see widespread use in large organizations for internal IT training? I suspect that there are at least 4 contributing reasons why it doesn’t seem to be as common as we would expect:

• Lack of Awareness – Screencast software is a surprising well-kept secret. We can’t count the number of times that we have spoken to programmers, program managers, and CIOs that don’t know even they exist. If we point them to examples on YouTube, they say: “I wondered how that was done”.
• Camera Shyness – It takes a certain amount of guts to record a movie that has your voice on it. What if you misspeak? What if you have a squeaky voice? What if you have a thick accent? All sorts of things can go wrong that will make you more nervous. Then you will make more mistakes and get even more nervous. Then you will give up.
• Lack of searchability – It takes time to demonstrate a complex software operation. Ten, twenty or thirty minutes is not uncommon. How many potential users have the patience to watch that much video to get an answer to a question? The problem is not getting to the right spot (most screencasts have tracker bars), the problem is knowing there is a right spot to get to. If only you could search the screencasts the way you search Google.
• No place to store them – Screencast movie files have gotten a lot smaller – but many are still to big to attach to corporate emails. That means that you need to put them on a web server or CD. If you accumulate a large collection, you will be talking gigabytes. Then how do you move them or find them. That brings us back to the searchability concern.

Apart from the awareness issue, these are valid concerns. Until someone finds a way to overcome them, they will delay the adoption of this powerful and exciting technology.

Dual Monitor

With dual monitor support, you can hook up a second monitor and expand your desktop to double its size. This will give you enough screen real estate to support two applications that are fully open and functional. The application to the problem statement at the start of this diary should be obvious. With two monitors, you can open your application on one screen and the help window on the other. You can view both simultaneously. You can copy and paste from one to the other in one quick motion. You can read instructions in the help file as you follow them in the application.

Every notebook computer built in the past 5 years has built-in support for an external monitor. For desktop computers, you may have to add an inexpensive video card and a second monitor. The total cost is typically less than $150 per seat. The return on that investment for a learner will be huge. Nonetheless, this capability is just starting to get the attention it deserves. You will find dual monitor setups in many software development shops, but not in most offices. Since there is no obvious drawback, it seems to be mainly an issue of awareness – and occasionally bureaucracy. One large company told me that all their IT support was outsourced to a 3rd party computer services firm. The service firm charged $100 per month for each monitor that it deployed! – Oh, nevermind.

Enterprise Video Sharing Server

By now, everyone is familiar with YouTube and its brethren. It may be less well-known that there are some terrific open-source (i.e., free license) cousins of YouTube that can be installed on almost any web server. iPOV has developed a dedicated version: The CoSolvent Community Server.

 

A Pragmatic IT Training Solution

What would happen if you combined screencasts, video-sharing and dual monitors to deliver IT training? If we can overcome the current concerns, the result would be pretty appealing. What would it take to make this happen? Consider two approaches.

Informal Solution

The first idea is targeted at internal, informal tech support and training. In this scenario, software implementers make ‘casual’ screencasts of transactions, problem areas, solutions and the like. There is an explicit contract that absolves the originators of responsibility for ‘cosmetic’ flaws. In a small organization, that usually isn’t a problem. Everyone knows everyone. If Marco stutters a bit, that’s no surprise. Everyone knows that Marco is the go-to expert and that outweighs the cosmetic flaws in his demonstration. A prototype workflow for this scenario is shown in the following diagram:

A software implementer (1) makes screencasts as they finish testing a transaction or module. They upload the video file to a YouTube-like video sharing website (2) like the one in this demo. End-users can view the demos directly from the video sharing sites on one of their dual monitors (3). The end-user can seek through the random-access video clips on one monitor and follow the instructions in the production software on the other monitor. An end user can search the video sharing site for relevant demos or tutorials. Alternatively, the developer can email the link to a relevant video to an end-user with a problem. The entire system is informal, responds quickly, and costs very little to operate.

While the informal solution is easy and cost effective, it doesn’t overcome the fundamental problems that discourage developers and users from using video for formal documentation. The informal approach avoids camera-shyness by making the
entire process casual and non-threatening. It relies on direct communication between the developers and the users to make material findable. Finally, it deals in fairly small amounts of video that are easy to store and manage. It can work well for project teams and small business units, but it won’t hold up on enterprise-class projects.

Enterprise Solution

As the scope of the documentation, training and support challenge expands, the informal approach will break down. The problems that can be glossed over with a few people will become insurmountable with large groups. To succeed at this level, the system needs another element – one that can deal with the issues of quality, camera-shyness, searchability and storage. A design solution for that problem is shown in the diagram that follows.

The enterprise version of this system adds two new elements. In addition to screencasts, video-sharing and dual-monitors, this system adds services to ensure the quality of the delivered instruction (4) and a more robust video repository and learning management system (5). In a large application, the use of dual monitors would be cost-effective, but it may not be practical to provide them for everyone. Employees with laptops only need access to a spare monitory. For deskbound employees, a reasonable compromise would be to set up a couple of dual-monitor ‘learning stations’ in each office.

For the developer, this system operates like the informal approach. They record tutorials and submit them to the video sharing repository. End-users may view these ‘draft’ materials if they need rapid response – for example to solve a localized problem. However, the enterprise approach goes a step farther. It takes the developer’s imperfect demonstrations out of the video sharing site and passes them through a formal process to generate polished, professional tutorials. iPOV offers services for this task in its standard: restatement and (optionally) enhancement transformations. The restatement process converts the developer’s imperfect commentary into a carefully validated, articulate voiceover. Since their commentary is discarded, developers have no reason to be self-conscious. The enhancement process can emphasize key points and mask blemishes. This makes it less likely that the developer will have to redo their work. Combined, these transformations mean that developers can record tutorials in one or two takes, making video the fastest, easiest way for them to discharge their documentation obligations.

Once the validated tutorials are prepared, iPOV can package them for use in a SCORM-compliant LMS as building blocks for lessons in an integrated course catalog. If other types of teaching materials are required, they can be added to the LMS from other sources. It is also possible to systematically reverse-engineer (extract) printed manuals, quizzes and job aids from the information contained in the video demonstrations.

This process can be completed with surprising speed. iPOV can routinely transform an hour of raw demonstration videos into an hour of polished, validated tutorial in 2 or 3 weeks – faster if it is a rush job. If that is too long, the video-sharing site can be ready to deliver an imperfect, but potentially useful version in a matter of minutes. These time frames compare favorably with most contemporary eLearning production processes.

Bottom Line: It’s easier and cheaper than you think

As with all of the processes at iPOV, this approach to eLearning production and distribution starts with a movie. However, these movies can be made on any laptop or desktop PC. They can be made anywhere that the target software will run. They can be made when a developer comes back from lunch. They can be made in the hotel on a business trip. They can be made at home in the evening. They can be made … anywhere and anytime. Once the movie is made, the expert may have just one more task. They may be asked to review the written draft script to make sure it says what they want it to say. Other than that, it is fire and forget.

How much does this cost? It depends. Most software development operations are capable of setting up the informal system without iPOV’s help. iPOV’s services for the enterprise model are likely to range between $4000 to $8000 per finished hour of video tutorial and may be even less on very large projects. If you are faced with the need to produce lots of eLearning and documentation on software projects, call iPOV. We can show you how to set up a surprisingly fast, low-cost solution.

You have a critical, but tricky, procedure that must be followed throughout your global operation. You have vendors in China, plants in Portland and Valdosta, offices in Seoul, Stuttgart and Cairo. So far, you have relied on emails and memos, but there are clear differences in the way they are applied in different locations. Is it language? Is it local preference? Are the memos just unclear? Whatever the reason, you need to solve it. Conflicting procedures are almost worse than no procedures at all.

How can you get everyone on the same page – quickly?

The Global Communications Challenge

The process for communication across distance, culture and language has been virtually unchanged for centuries. To be sure, we have improved it with technology. We now send emails instead of messengers. We are using webinars instead of travelling to meetings. But the basic process is qualitatively the same:

There are at least 5 distinct intellectual steps in the process of transferring expert knowledge to a different language and culture. Each step demands the engagement of a motivated, knowledgeable expert to move the information forward to the next stage. If there is any lack of knowledge, a lack of attention, or confusion, the message may not get to the destination intact.

To an engineer or systems designer, a system like this is a cause for deep concern. Each step is a potential ‘single point of failure’ that can jeopardize or halt knowledge transfer. Worse, if something goes wrong at one of these steps, no one may spot the problem until the error is seen in the performance at the other end. The error, plus the delay, can cost a lot of time and money. Too often, the only practical remedy is to get on an airplane to go and sort it out.

The problem gets worse for a global, multicultural, multi-lingual enterprise. Global companies don’ t have one message transfer process – they may have thousands per week. Each has the same inherent weaknesses. When they are considered collectively, it is virtually certain that an costly percentage of the communications will fail. In fact, it is amazing that so many messages actually get through. In a rapidly globalizing world, the prognosis seems dire and the solutions are all costly. Yet, what choice does a global enterprise have? is there no better way?

Not as long as the process involves the traditional steps (with their single points of failure). Internet technology can help around the edges, but it can’t make people conceptualize more clearly, it can’t do foolproof translation in context and it can’t help people to interpret foreign instructions to fit their work. It can mainly move the (possibly broken) messages more quickly. It can also reduce the time and cost to repair the damage. Webinars and conference calls can at least minimize the airplane fares.

A Robust Communication System

There is an alternative that is both much better and very affordable. iPOV has been pioneering practical applications of this idea for several years. Like everything else that we do, it starts with the idea that video is the key. Suppose we take the message supply chain and, instead of relying on written text, we emphasize the use of video. We’re not talking about TV or professional quality video. We’re talking about the informal video that might be uploaded to YouTube.

Let’s suppose that, instead of being asked to write a manual or procedure, the subject expert is asked to demonstrate and explain the procedure. Let’s further suppose that someone knowledgeable attends the demonstration session with the intent of asking questions to clarify the expert’s explanation. This video is recorded with one of the low-cost video capture technologies that are springing up everywhere. Finally, let’s suppose that the recording, warts and all, is digitized as a Flash movie that can be uploaded and shared from a web server. If those simple things can be arranged, it is possible to explore a whole new approach to multi-lingual and cross-cultural communication. The following diagram illustrates iPOV’s implementation of this concept. In our approach, the communication will pass through a series of steps that are similar to the traditional approach, but differ in some very important ways.

The process starts with the capture of an expert demonstration or presentation. The capture is done with screencasting for computer tasks, PowerPoint screencasts for concept presentations, digital camcorders for physical action, or any combination of the three. The resulting video clips move through iPOV’s construction and restatement transformations to generate a validated, professional English master. The scripts from the now-validated English master are then processed through the translation transformation to generate a version in the target language. This is the document that the ultimate user must work from.

The diagram shows the feature that makes this a much better, safer approach. Even though iPOV will translate the text to the target language, the video will remain unaltered. In fact, the video will remain constant and identical across every language version that is ultimately produced. The principal part of the information will be immune to error over the full span of the transmission process. To be sure, a translation mistake might occur in the script or voiceover, but the video portion will remain intact. Some viewer along the way will probably spot the discrepancy and ask for clarification. In other words, the consistent video will act as a safety net for the accuracy of the overall communication.

The use of video may carry another, even bigger benefit. In the current text translation process, it is very difficult for the source of the information to verify the accuracy of the translation. Most Americans can’t read or understand Chinese, so we cannot tell if our words are translated accurately. We can only judge by the behavior that those translated words create at the destination. If people react the way we expect, we assume that the message got through. With video, we can view the message at every step of the process. If the video remains intact, we know exactly what our audience is seeing. If the video is somehow impaired or swapped, we can tell instantly that the message is being garbled.

Communicating Visually

On its merits, we would expect that video must assume a central role in global communication. This is as true for routine industrial and business communication as it is for entertainment and social communication. However, there are several forces that seem to be holding back widespread use of video in everyday communications. In our experience, three factors are due to general unfamiliarity with the power of current web video:

• People are intimidated by the folklore that ‘video is hard to make’.
  That used to be true. The YouTube generation proves that things have
  changed. Any residual concern is eliminated by iPOV’s ability to take
  mediocre video and make it look professional.
• Video files are too big to ship. Once again, YouTube shows that is
  an outdated concern. As more countries come online with major broadband
  investments, that concern will totally evaporate.
• Risk and Inertia. The idea proposed in this article is not
  complicated. However, it is radically different from accepted current
  practice. In a conservative business climate, it will take a bit of
  courage to try something this different. Fortunately, it is easy to try
  a small experiment – then scale up if it is promising.

However, as industrial video comes into wider use, there will be a fourth challenge. Most people are uncertain about their ability to present knowledge in a visual form. In most cases, they have never tried to package their explanations to be visually self-evident. While this is a challenge, it also offers an opportunity for competitive advantage. If an organization can coach and facilitate its personnel to be more visual, they can cut their communications costs and increase their speed and accuracy.

It is important to remember that the communication need not be perfectly visual to be effective. The goal is to add a visual communication component that can be cross-verified with the audio and textual communication. iPOV has recorded hundreds of examples of informal video. Some were 100% self-evident from the video presentation. Most were combinations of text, audio and visual elements. In all cases, however, the video component reduced the chance that the text would be misinterpreted. With the right coaching, virtually anyone can craft visual explanations or demonstrations that will supplement and safeguard their standard correspondence. The following examples were all generated by ordinary employees that were not video or graphics experts. To gauge the value of the video content, consider playing these movies with the sound off:

• A physical demonstration is almost completely self-evident. To test this, play the video with the sound off.
• Software transaction “how-to” illustrates how to perform a software transaction.
• Sofware Code Walkthrough contains lots of valuable visual clues to help the viewer understand the structure of the code.
• Recording of a PowerPoint presentation – even though this contains a lot of word slides, the audio sequencing and the deliberate pacing of the explanation would make it more easily understood by a translator or a viewer with English as a second language.

In addition to iPOV’s experience, there are many other sources. Some of the best ideas and inspirations can be found at YouTube and Google Video. They contain a growing collection of explanatory clips. Try viewing the foreign language videos, or play others with the sound off. It is often amazing what you can understand:

• This video shows how how to peel a potato in seconds – in Japanese.
• The late Carl Sagan proves that you don’t need special effects to explain something complex – like the 4th Dimension. You just need a tabletop with paper, apples and a clear plastic cube.
• This screencast explains how to make a complex graphic with software. The video has no sound, perhaps because the author doesn’t speak English!
• This PowerPoint presentation by the late Cpt. Patriquin influenced the US military to reverse their policy in Iraq’s Anbar province.

Finally, if anyone is really bitten by the bug of visual explanation, check out books by
Edward Tufte. He has published amazing collections that show how to put complex ideas into pictorial forms. Few people
will match his insight, but most people will find inspiration and useful
ideas. It would take very little effort for an organization to assemble a library of examples and templates to help its staff build better visual explanations. This is an area that current instructional design staff may find interesting and iPOV will be happy to help.

Bottom Line

If the idea of rapid, error-free, multi-lingual communicatin seems appealing, please give us a call and let us help you to explore it. What have you got to lose? If you do global business, you are almost certainly suffering losses every day. This is one of those opportunities where the possible outcomes range between ‘lose very small’ and ‘hit the jackpot’. Those are pretty good investment odds.

You’ve seen multimedia that you would love to use in corporate communication. Unfortunately, the corporate IT department is very security-conscious. They resist installing a new server or web application inside the firewall, and they forbid putting corporate information on outside hosts. They ‘encourage’ everyone use the company’s secure document management system (.e.g., Lotus Notes or Microsoft Sharepoint) for all business communication. Is video out of the question?

iPOV’s Rich Media PDF

iPOV has refined a way to embed sophisticated, animated Flash videos inside a standard Adobe PDF file. The result is an integrated, thoroughly standard PDF. If you give us a Word document and a video (in almost any format), we will return a polished ‘Rich Media PDF’ like the following examples. Note: In keeping with their PDF format, these should be downloaded to a local disk and viewed from there. Download times will vary according to file size:

Right Click on Thumbnail and Save PDF to Disk in Order to View	Example Application
	Software Instruction Memo (1.7MB, 1 video clip) – It’s pretty common that a minor software problem will get in the way of productivity. Wouldn’t it be nice to record a quick fix or procedure change and send a totally unambiguous memo to let everyone know what to do.
	Video work instruction (2.2MB, 2 video clips)- This shows the correct method to perform the sort of factory or distribution task that is used throughout industry. The work instruction design contains two video clips. One shows the task being performed at full, expert speed. The second shows it being performed step-by-step to make the subtleties more evident. Click here to view an in document version.
	A video prospectus for a real estate property (10MB, 1 video clip) – Most of the information in this flyer is given in the embedded video clip. Even though the video has no commentary, it still gives a more accurate impression of the property than any text or still picture could ever achieve.
	Instruction sheet for a computer maintenance task (1.9MB, 1 video clip)- This video-enhanced document combines a step-by-step written procedure with an illustrative video clip. The listing ensures that the viewer has a complete guide to the tasks. The video clip ensures that the viewer can put the list of instructions in their proper physical context.
	Procedure for using software (14MB, 5 video clips)- Video clips with screencast movies of a software application have been added to a detailed step-by-step procedure. The procedure provides the accurate details for the task, while the videos provide situational context and a sense of the flow of the transaction. A viewer can remember the transaction flow far more easily than they can memorize a list of steps.
	How to change the oil in your car (3.7MB, 1 video clip)- This is a simple procedure, but it illustrates how a synchronized script can be added to the video clip to make the speech clearer. The companion script could also be used to add extra description or even warnings that are synchronized with the action.

Who would need this?

These PDFs will play on any computer where Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Flash Player are installed. Presumably, anyone who wants to view a PDF will have Acrobat Reader installed and, according to Adobe’s statistics, Flash Player is installed on 98% of computer desktops. Companies can handle situations where a multimedia web page is not feasible:

• IT security policies make it difficult to put the video on a web site.
• Bandwidth limitations make it difficult to stream video to the target audience.
• The target computer is not connected to a high-speed network.
• Users are carrying laptops into areas with low connectivity.
• The company’s official documents must reside in a document management system like Sharepoint or Lotus Notes.
• The company assembles collections of documents to distribute on CD or DVD to stakeholders beyond the firewall.
• The company deals extensively with overseas offices that have slow connections.
• etc.

In each of these situations, a Rich Media PDF would offer an attractive alternative. This format will fit in many of those awkward places where a multimedia website cannot reach.

Requirements, Time and Cost

• The cost depends on the amount of processing that iPOV must apply to the video. To prepare a video (without additional editing) and place it in a PDF with customer-supplied text (e.g., with the formatted contents of a Word document) typically costs $75/page, or less in larger quantities.
• If iPOV is asked to apply its standard video transformations to the video clips, the cost will generally be determined by the transformations. Since the ‘flattened Flash movie’ is an iPOV standard output, PDF page publication fees are typically waived.
• Simple page constructions are returned in 1 to 2 days.

Bottom Line

Rich Media PDFs are a useful compromise between static text and graphics documents on one hand and multimedia websites on the other. They offer rich multimedia, with a level of portability and flexibility that a website cannot match. Finally, they offer rich media in a package that is widely accepted by security-conscious IT departments. If you have text documents and videos that you would like to display together, consider giving us a call.

The Global Supply Chain Analogy

The problems that individuals and companies have in communicating with other languages and other lands are virtually the same challenges that have afflicted the shippers of goods throughout history. If you look at images of previous transportation systems, you will see that nothing really changed over most of human existence. Every shipment was pretty much handled the same way. Stuff was loaded and unloaded and loaded and unloaded. The ships got bigger and faster, trains replaced barges and wagons gave way to trucks, but it was always a laborious, error-prone system as shown in the following images:

Each individual box, bale and bag had to be handled separately, perhaps a dozen times between origin and destination. How many times did a package get lost? How many times was it misplaced? What if there was something valuable or time-sensitive in that package? Tough luck. Think airline bags – but this all changed with the advent of standard containers and specialized handling equipment:

Once pieces are loaded, locked and sealed in a container, they are never touched until they reach their destination. In between, the entire transportation system is optimized to move and store standard 10ft x10ft x 40ft boxes. To the transportation system, their contents are irrelevant. There are no bags to leak, no boxes to break and no bales to spill. Just a standard box that is handled the same efficient way in thousands of terminals and ports around the world.

How important is this innovation? Almost unmeasurable. If standard containers didn’t exist, it is doubtful that we would have anything like the current global economy. Walmart and Target could not exist in their current forms. Products in every part of the world would be more expensive and new innovations would arrive much later to the market. The immense choice that consumers enjoy would be greatly reduced. The quality of our goods would probably be lower. Things would not be the same.

The Traditional Knowledge Supply Chain

So how does the remaking of the global supply chain concern issues of knowledge, culture, language or eLearning? Consider the system by which we transmit technical knowledge across distance, culture and language:

This is also a supply chain – with the same problems that have afflicted goods transportation for millenia. This diagram might have described how a Greek trader communicated with a Roman merchant. Each idea is written, interpreted or translated multiple times, often with a poor understanding of the original context or nuance. It’s the pre-container goods shipping system applied to technical knowledge. By the time it reaches its destination, the message can be lost, garbled, de-emphasized or distorted – and the shipper may never know. If my technical instructions are translated into Arabic for someone in Morocco to act on them, how can I know that they are correctly conveyed or understood?

But what if we could find a standard shipping container for our ideas and knowledge. What if we could take our technical information, seal it in a box with standard ‘dimensions’ and send it through a communication system that is optimized to handle that package quickly and efficiently? What if we could track each shipment cheaply and easily? What if we could inspect the contents ourselves after it reaches the destination? Wouldn’t that be as revolutionary as global containerization?

A Shipping Container for Ideas?

As I described in this earlier article, iPOV believes that video offers special benefits to the communication of ideas across distance, culture and language. If we use video as part of the communication package, it can retain its integrity across the full communication sequence:

In other words, video is a standard shipping container for knowledge! Video can convey accurate information without words. You can see the power in this YouTube movie: Japanese instructions on how to peel a potato in 2 seconds. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, you can probably figure out how to copy their method. There are enough visual cues to remove most of the uncertainty. The words, if anything, just distract and get in the way. In the following examples, a video ‘how-to’ is delivered in three different language contexts. The video clip remains the same. Even though the accompanying text and commentary traverse the traditional translation process, the information contained in the video was packed and sealed when the video was made. The video portion will always convey the same message and will always act as a contextual check on the accompanying text and commentary. In fact, the text and commentary in this example represent little more than elaborate shipping labels. Try turning the sound off on your computer and watching the clips again.

Printer Maintenance (English)

Printer Maintenance (Chinese Subtitles)

Printer Maintenance (German)

This example makes a strong case for the “video as container” idea. There will be many other types of information that are not as easily packaged in an visual format as this physical procedure. Nonetheless, adding video to any communication will put some fraction of the total message into a package that will guaranteed the contents throughout the journey. Even if most of the message is more easily captured in text, an accompanying video clip will increase the odds that the recipient will put the message in context.

Most of the infrastructure and technology to efficiently handle video is already in place. Many tools exist on the public Internet (e.g., YouTube). Hosts of other tools are being developed by web companies, software vendors and in open source projects. For its part, iPOV has developed and assembled a uniquely comprehensive toolkit that is specifically tailored to speed and facilitate this process, including our Video Translation Transformation and our CoSolvent Community Server.

Bottom Line

I believe that our global economy is on the verge of an information revolution that will be as profound as the one that transformed goods transportation in the past 30 years. It will take a while for the opportunity to sink in, but gradually people will discover how much it will pay to explain things in a visual form. Adding an informal video to a technical communication will make it more likely that the message will get through and iPOV is aggressively developing the ‘virtual’ trucks, trains, ports and cranes to handle this new type of information cargo.

Each step is a potential ‘single point of failure’ that can threaten success. Worse, if something goes wrong, no one may spot the problem until the error is seen in the performance at the other end. For communications concerning food safety, the consumer could become the ultimate victim of any miscommunication.

A better approach is to ask the subject expert to demonstrate some part of the procedure in front of a video camera. It takes little, if any, training to use a low-cost video camcorder in this way. Ideally, someone knowledgeable would attend and ask probing questions. Later, if required, the expert’s commentary can be transcribed and translated and displayed online.

In this method, the visual part of the message remains constant through every stage of the process and into every language version that is produced. In other words, the video portion is immune to error over the entire transmission process. If a translation mistake occurs in the voiceover or in the companion text, iPOV expects that most viewers will believe what they see in the video – as they should. Even better, they may ask for a clarification. The video helps to protect the accuracy of the entire communication.

Finally, most technical experts won’t be fluent in the target language. This means that they won’t know if their words are translated accurately until the observed behavior at the destination confirms success or raises a suspicion. If the expert and the recipient can both view a video clip on a web server, the expert will at least be sure that the video portion arrived intact.