The Power of the CubeTree Feed

Have richer conversations that matter

CubeTree first and foremost is a way to improve communications between groups of people working together on just about anything. Central to CubeTree and central to improving communications is the feed. The feed itself is inspired by the feeds in other common communication tools, like the social feed in Facebook or the feed you create for people you follow on Twitter. Unlike those feeds, you have greater control of your CubeTree feed as both a broadcaster and a listener; you are in control of what you choose to broadcast out and what you choose to listen to.

In CubeTree the feed is important because it is meant to be the primary way that you navigate the system. The basic idea behind the feed is that you control what you see. You tell the system what you're interested in and the information you want enters your feed. It's the opposite of your inbox, where only the things other people want you to see are presented. In CubeTree you are the producer of your own news feed and make the decisions about who and what is in it. You are greeted with a list of activities about people and things you've told us you are interested in anytime you open CubeTree.

Why would you want to communicate this way? The main reason is to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. Signal-to-noise ratio is a measure, often used in science and engineering, to quantify how much a signal has been corrupted by 'unwanted sound'. What I think many of us are faced with in our inbox is a lot of noise in the form of large numbers of emails we aren't really interested in or large numbers of emails we've been CC'd or BCC'd on because the sender thinks they are important, not necessarily because we think they are important. If you're like me, I'm sure you spend a great deal of time 'managing' your inbox, trying to pull out the important emails and separate them from all the other emails in your inbox. CubeTree's feed system is an alternate, better way for most communications because both the sender and the receiver have the ability to use the system to remove the 'noise' from their 'signals' ensuring that they get heard by the right listeners and at the right time, when they are ready to receive.

My Follows Feed

What you can do with the feed then, is have conversations that are richer and warmer than those you can have in email. You can comment and participate in conversations at a time and place of your own choosing. More importantly, you have several different ways in which you can interact with items in your feed. You can broadcast a comment back to the feed and if you want to highlight your comment to a specific person, you can by including their @user tag in your comment. Some posts you may just want to read, take in the information and let them go by. That's fine, you got the info you needed and you didn't add noise back into the system. You could also choose to bookmark an important item so you can find it again and take action on it later.

Because you can control the quality of the information in your feed by choosing who to follow and what to filter out, you're much more likely to involve yourself in conversations and collaborations that matter to you, your role in the company and your co-workers. The richness of communication options means you can have different levels of response to different items. You're going to see more of what's going on in your company that's relevant to you. And that means you're going to be putting out in the feed items that other people are going to be tuning their feeds to listen to as well.

The feed is the soul of CubeTree and it's the main way for you to interact with the system and help you get your job done. When you customize your feed and filter out the noise you unlock the power of CubeTree and know that your view of what's going on will be vital and relevant to you. It'll be easier to find conversations you need to participate in and find it easier to contribute and collaborate with others in your organization through the feed.

Better File Sharing with Social Documents

Preview documents and add comments before you download.

Social documents is a feature that you can use to share files and comments with multiple people in CubeTree. It improves on existing file sharing by giving you file preview and visual commenting capabilities. File preview lets you browse through the pages in a document and visual commenting was inspired by John Madden using his Telestrator to mark up football re-plays on national TV.

We added social documents because existing file sharing in most products only let you upload a file and share a link, which isn't very useful for collaboration. You have to download the file before you can look at it to make sure you have the right one. If you want to comment or share edits, you have to make those in the document itself or send an email to a list of collaborators. Neither one is very visible to the group of people trying to work together on it. Making comments in a document that you can only see after you download it also makes version management an issue; collaborators never know for sure if they have the most current version with all the comments.

Social documents is a better way of file sharing because it keeps a single master copy in one place that is always updated with the latest comments in real time, not one that is floating around in people's email. Its also a great way to share best practices between different users. Imagine an inside sales person adding comments about the sales win that worked for an account to the 'customer logo' page in the corporate presentation. Now all the sales people have access to that specific success story when they are using the deck for their next call.

Social documents completely changes the notion of working on a shared document by giving users two powerful collaboration capabilities right inside of CubeTree: file preview and visual commenting.

File preview

The first thing we did to improve file sharing was to add file preview for most documents (PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint) so you can flip through all uploaded files quickly to find just the ones you need. The second thing we did was to include two kinds of previews, thumbnails and full page views. Thumbnails help you find specific content within a large document while its still online. And full page views are large enough that you can read individual pages online and then add your comments. It makes it simple to search through many documents quickly and easier to find the ones you need.

Visual commenting

You already have visual commenting in CubeTree for photos. Now you can use visual commenting with Files too. To add a visual comment you simply select an area on a document, preview and type in your remarks.

Your comment appears as a callout on the document over the part of the page you want to highlight. For example you can pick out the 3rd bullet on slide 3 in a PowerPoint presentation and make a comment about how 'this seems wrong' or how a 'customer loves this point'. That comment then is visible on the page to anyone else who looks at this file. It also appears in your company's CubeTree feed or @feed to notify co-workers who are collaborating on the document.

Using social documents is a better and faster way to share and collaborate on documents and presentations in CubeTree. Watch them in action on the video below.