Edit Share - A Solution

Today I found a company that would be able to help solve my problem. After a long conversation with them I found that there is a A/V file management hardware that allows for collaboration. This server called the EditShare allows multipule video files to be captured to one place. At that point multiple people can access the files in order to start production on them. What a dream come true. It turns out that the EditShare is widely used in the broadcasting field. I quickly got the uppers to talk with them. I believe we are scheduled to get one in as soon as possible... I hope this works. We are a week out from two events and everything needs to be set up and tested.

New Classroons - File Management Hell

With the economic down turn, a lot of our clients have been cutting travel and increasing online training. This is great for us as we provide this service to our clients. This change however has twisted the current production procedure. I was just told that instead of our traditional 7-8 day turn around, I would need to produce all assets within 24 hours. Upon hearing this news I thought I was going to pass out. Then the news got worse. I had been managing to rooms for events in which events hardly ever overlapped each other; I now would be given four more rooms and events would overlap. I then discovered that the next event I would be managing six rooms at the same time. I had to go outside for a bit after hearing this. There were so many bad things running through my head at that point; how could I possibly accomplish this crazy insane task?

We had to quickly find a solution to the four extra rooms that were being added. We had to build them to be able to intergate into our production process. Getting equipment into the rooms and setting them up wasn't too big of an issue. We had our Engineer run a bunch of blueprints and get them built. One of the issues I had was how would we be able to manage off of the video and audio assets once the content was captured? Running hard drives to all the different rooms, collecting them, and then figuring out which went where seemed like a total nightmare. I brought this issue to my boss. It'll be my task to find a way to manage this he says. I am now currently looking for some sort of A/V collaboration software or hardware. Does anything like this even exist?

Google Doc Blunders

So far it has been a week since the new site has been implemented. The docs that I had moved over from the old wiki along with the new documents that I have collaborated with my close co-workers as in the high swing of things. The issue however is that because our company is split; one crew is located in Milpitas and the other is Los Gatos, the motivation to use this tools is disconnected. Because I have learned how useful these tools are and widely use them myself, my colleagues are on the same page. At the home office in Los Gatos, people are so used to the old way of doing things that they are close minded in using a new tool.

During our weekly production meeting, I presented the fact that we at Milpitas are using the Google Docs and Google Sites resources quite often. It was helping our team be organized with training contractors, creating new procedure documents, and organizing other resources so that they are easily accessible. The argument from Los Gatos was that there was a learning curve in which they had to overcome. They did not like the idea of online collaboration because they thought it might cause confusion to who was doing what. They would like to contour using e-mail as a way of collaboration.

I have found one very valid point thus far; it's easy to implement new technology, but it is hard to get people to use it.

Google Docs - Success

An issue of training and employee collaboration has been an issue with the company I work for ever since I started. Last year while taking ITEC 830, I brought the idea of using a Ning to the table. I was asked to set one up as a trial. All of the employees seemed to like the idea but the uppers did not like it. They were worried about the look and thought it was unprofessional to use in our establishment. My argument was that the Ning would be an internal place for collaboration; no clients would ever see it. It was turned down and the ning I had set up is now in the black hole of the Internet.

I tried to introduce Google Docs in another attempt to keep collaboration going. We were using a very old wiki site called JotSpot which was set up very poorly. Information was very hard to find and the application kept crashing. Again, I was turned down. I was determined to hold on to my site. As it turns out, this week we all received a notice from IT saying that JotSpot will be closing for good. The information that we had stored there needed to be backed up or else it would be lost. There was a plea to find another solution to our wiki issue. I brought up that the Google Docs and Google Sites page I set up already had most of the information ported. Making that transition to the new site would not be hard. Unfortunately because I had used our company name for our sites page IT was unable to easily create the corporate version with the same name. Of course I was to blame for this but with a little help from our friends at Google, our company has finally adapted using a Web 2.0 tool!