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Do I need real-time collaboration?
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If your users are constantly sharing information and sometimes stepping over each others work, you probably need real-time collaboration.
If your users are constantly working on the same computer on content creation, you probably need real-time collaboration.
If your team is not co-located and trying to explain over the phone what to do is more time consuming than doing it yourself, you are probably in need of real-time collaboration.
If at the end of the day you wonder why most of your meetings are to sync your collaborator and none of them to do "real" work, you probably need real-time collaboration.
If minutes before sending that important email you are endlessly hitting the "Receive Mail" button to get your coworkers last minute changes, you are definitely in need of real-time collaboration.
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Is beWeeVee the right technology for me?
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The beWeeVee API provides you with the ability to incorporate real-time collaboration on your Desktop or Silverlight application. If your application uses the create-review-iterate content creation paradigm, where individual persons can contribute to the content then beWeeVee can be of use. Create-review-iterate is one of the most common scenarios in business activities, from freeform text editing like on CMS, Wikis, programming, documents, etc to structured information like in content forms or business flow diagramming.
In short, if your software is used by multiple persons with a common goal we are sure that we can help you build features that would boost your users' productivity and user experience.
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Do I have to re-architecture my entire application to use those features?
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No. beWeeVee is designed to be plugged in new and existing applications. If your application has been developed in any of the supported runtimes, you can start supporting high impact simple activities and move forward one step at a time at a minimal cost.
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What are the supported runtimes?
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beWeeVee API supports:
- .Net 3.5 on Visual Studio 2008
- .Net 4.0 Beta 2 on Visual Studio 2010
- Silverlight 3.0 (special built Silverlight 2.0 version also available for licensees)
- Mono
- Javascript (through Silverlight Interoperation, requires Silverlight installed on the client).
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How can I start?
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Download the beWeeVee Software Development Kit or
contact us and play with the samples provided. The samples include P2P (using Microsoft Peer Networking) and Client-Server text editing on Windows Presentation Foundation. Drawing application using Silverlight 3.0 with custom coded servers. Use beWeeVee Notepad Silverlight Sample (source also available for licensees) with other users on the
beWeeVee Web Notepad
Understand what the technology is capable of doing for your software. You can also check some typical software development industry scenarios on how to use beWeeVee features.
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How do you license beWeeVee?
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The beWeeVee Software Development Kit is free of use for Academic, Non-Commercial (including Open Source) software. For Commercial Software, you can license with a royalty based license (revenue sharing model) without an up-front fee; or through an standard flat fee with or without access to the source code. We also provide industry and regional exclusivity deals.
Contact partners@corvalius.com for any inquires regarding using beWeeVee in your new or existing product.
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My company develops software for the X industry, is beWeeVee of use here?
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Highly probable. People in all industries are required to collaborate to achieve goals; beWeeVee is designed to help you create solutions that allow your users to really collaborate even if they are hundreds of miles away. If you add telepresence facilities like phone, video-conference, etc, your users will feel as if they were sitting in front of each other.
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But isn't this Google Wave?
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No, Google Wave is a product from Google designed to replace the email as the medium of collaboration.
There are many subtle (and not so subtle) differences, like:
- Google Wave is a product designed for the web that provides extensibility infrastructure. beWeeVee is a technology that solves many of the difficulties of implementing real-time collaboration features in your .Net application.
- Google Wave requires a server to host the "waves". beWeeVee is natively peer-to-peer so it adjusts to your architectural and persistence needs.
- Google Wave's reconciliation algorithm is point to point so it requires federation protocols. beWeeVee's reconciliation algorithm is peer-to-peer, federation is available by design, is up to you to decide how do you want it to behave.
- Google Wave requires to be connected. Applications using beWeeVee are their own server, so they can work disconnected and still use its key features like change tracking and playback.
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Can Google Wave and beWeeVee interoperate?
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Not at the time, however both technologies have similarities in that they provide conflict-free synchronization, so it is not a major undertaking to create a bridge between both of them. If you are interested in developing and commercializing such a solution, contact
partners@corvalius.com.
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How does beWeeVee allows me to write text simultaneously?
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Luckily for you, you are not required to mess around with the reconciliation process that allows conflict free data synchronization. Simultaneously writing text and drawing is a side effect of it.
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Why is conflict free data synchronization so difficult?
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There are lots of reasons why it is hard, but the biggest is that it is defect sensitive. Even one small defect (something that in other software could be a corner case) can corrupt your entire operation stream. To ensure that the core engine is bug free is definitely one of the hardest tasks of the beWeeVee team. Just to put it in context, the testing robot that implements the die-hard tests required to pass for every release takes 17 hours on a quad core computer.
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And what is an operation stream anyways?
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Your artifacts (documents, photos, vector graphics, web pages, etc) change over time. What you see today is in reality the outcome of all the operations that you have performed over the artifact since it was created. The operation stream is information that allows beWeeVee to reconstruct the state of the artifact at any moment in time. Think on it as if at every keystroke you are saving a copy to be used later, only that you are also doing it for your remote users too. The difficult part, local and remote final results MUST MATCH.
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Do the operation stream allow me to have unlimited undo?
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Yes, the basis of playback ability and the unlimited undo is the operation stream. We have all that we need to reverse any operation performed over the stream, and in the process recreate the artifact one step at a time (playback).
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Why would I need playback?
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The uses of playback are unlimited, because they give you context. We have identified many use cases, but we are sure you will find more in your domain of choice. In our own development environment, the most useful ones are those that allow you understand what your peers did. Being able to see how your collaborator got there, gives you very important contextual information. Suppose that you need to modify a complex algorithm. Why this guy that left the team did that? You now can see how he developed the algorithm, what he tried, what did work, and most importantly what didn't.
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