Web-based design with ConceptShare

March 23rd saw Under The Radar‘s ‘Why Office 2.0 matters’ event in Silicon Valley. The organisation exists to spot and encourage early stage innovation through its conferences and its blog. And few things are more early stage right now than Office 2.0.

Yes, the 2.0 moniker is tiresome, but it’s a useful way to differentiate applications that run on the web as opposed to any particular operating system. They are highly interactive, just like a desktop program but many of them allow people to collaborate within the software. The applications are usually delivered from a hosted service, but some are provided as an application running on a company server or as an appliance.

The Under The Radar judges and the audience both voted ConceptShare the winner in the ‘web sharing’ category. As the name suggests, it offers a workspace in which various people can share the development of, erm, concepts. Well, to be precise, visual concepts. And it is good.

Anyone who supplies or buys design services can benefit. It allows everyone involved to mark up or comment on designs from their web-connected computer. If they happen to be online at the same time, they can also participate in an instant message chat. Imagine the meetings, laborious email exchanges or motorcycle courier expenses than can be avoided by this simple mechanism.

Multiple comments and markups can be applied to each page, or each part of the design. Using forward and backward arrows or scrolling through a list, you can see who’s said what and how they’ve scribbled on the work. Because this stuff is in layers, they neither clash with each other nor affect the underlying design.

Here’s a bit of one of my experiments:

You will probably see my crudely drawn red line, this is associated with the post-it like comment box below. These boxes can be placed anywhere on the design. There are a few controls, including zoom, which is useful for fine-grained mark ups. At the foot of the image, you can see a couple of entries in the audit trail/instant message area.

The service is free to try for a single workspace. You can change the project within the workspace as much as you like. Or you can start paying, depending on number of workspaces, number of account managers, workspaces and storage. Security is higher for the paid service and, at the upper levels, your own site branding can be used. Monthly fees range from $19 to $199.

David Tebbutt is an award-winning columnist and feature writer who specialises on the subject of using software and technology to increase business productivity. He's an analyst with Freeform Dynamics but, in previous lives, wrote for Director magazine, Real Business and was also editor of Personal Computer World. http://freeformdynamics.com