Meet StickyNotePages, a seriously cool conferencing collaboration tool

It’s pretty rare I gush with excitement. After 14 years in the web conferencing industry, most of the “new stuff” is a twist on an old idea.

StickyNotePages, however, is a breath of fresh air.

Have you ever worked in this scenario?

Think of a time in an offline setting where you used sticky notes as part of a group exercise. Maybe a consultant or meeting facilitator had you brainstorm ideas. Maybe you’re a team leader trainer guiding a team through analyzing, synthesizing, and prioritizing or process-izing a pile of ideas. (I write the blog, so I can make up words like process-ize)

Now tell me how you’d accomplish that in a virtual meeting.

Screen sharing, sharing documents, sharing keyboard and mouse control, chat, drawing and markup tools are all hallmarks of quality conferencing platforms. And it’s not that you couldn’t get this done, but it’s not a direct and immediate translation.

Enter StickyNotePages

StickyNotePages an add-on to Adobe Connect that not only takes what you already do naturally and translates it to an online environment.

Why StickyNotePages is on the money

Back to our collaboration scenario. Whether your session is fairly transient (a one time strategy or training session) or persistent (a Kanban wall), what do you do with what you create? You save it. You share it. You turn it into something that you can come back to…a document that gets shared or a wall in a room that everybody takes pics of with their smartphones so they can email ’em around.

Integration of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration

Start offline on your own notes, move online for the session, save notes to the cloud, use them again.

Do online what you can’t do offline (at or or at least very well)

Change the color of a note, duplicate a note, save multiple copies, host multiple pages.

Seamless integration with breakout rooms

Drag and drop between rooms, go back and forth from the main room to breakouts (and back).

The bottom line

As I sat a recent demo with ActiveC’s CEO James Booth and content developer Krystian Jones I had one question for them… when is this available for organizations that use something other than Adobe Connect? It’s that cool (and have non-Connect clients who’d love some configuration of it).

One caveat. There are huge swaths of the population who still complain that they can’t imagine how they’d use online collaboration enough to warrant an investment of their time or money into a quality conferencing solution (I’ll save the gasps of despair for later). The current configuration and feature set are intermediate.

An extended free trial is available if you want to check out StickyNotePages for yourself.

 

4 thoughts on “Meet StickyNotePages, a seriously cool conferencing collaboration tool

  1. Jennifer Lyle

    Did ActiveC answer your question?

    Wish I had time to explore StickyNotes further, but I certainly won’t forget about it.

    You wrote, “Screen sharing, sharing documents, sharing keyboard and mouse control, chat, drawing and markup tools are all hallmarks of quality conferencing platforms.” Is it possible to create a comparison chart of existing conferencing platforms based on these characteristics?

    Very specifically, I’d like to know which conferencing platforms offer drawing tools (I use a Mac).

    Thanks for your always- informative website

    1. TheVP

      Thanks, Jennifer, and yes, they did. My bad if I implied otherwise…James and Krystian were cordial and knowledgeable.

      As for your question…most tools allow drawing/annotation of some sort, so that’d be a long list (Connect, Webex, GoToMeeting, ClickMeeting, AnyMeeting, FuzeMeeting, Omnovia, ReadyTalk, and on and on). And most have some sort of trial period, which means you could explore them.

      One point of differentiation isn’t “DO they have drawing tools compatible with your Mac” (coming to you from my own MacBook Pro). Your exploration might be “WHAT/WHICH?” Maybe you just need to highlight. But you might also want to change pen colors, give different color pens to each participant, write/type with text, have virtual laser pointers, change the width of a pen’s tip (skinny or fat), combine drawing tools with other things like checkmarks or emoticons, etc.

      It certainly would be possible to compare all these in a chart…if you want to tackle it, I’m happy to publish it and give you all the credit. I confess, however, it’s not likely to happen soon on my calendar of events. 🙂

    2. James

      Most of the conferencing software / platforms provide white boarding or annotation features, but some are much more fully featured than others.

      Eg, with Connect the draw tool really is able to do most things you might need in a meeting, multiple whiteboard pages, and editing objects that you created with the tool being key in my opinion. The ability to do basic things (such as edit a text item, select and move multiple items, set transparency levels of draw objects like boxes, eclipses etc) shouldn’t’ be taken for granted with all the tools.

      Another key question is how multi user do you want / need the tool to be, as the tools vary widely in this regard.

      James

      1. TheVP

        Thanks James, and good points.

        “Take for granted” is a big challenge in conferencing in general. Just because a feature appears on a datasheet doesn’t mean it is well-designed and useful in its implementation.

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