A new patent granted to Rosebud expands document collaboration beyond one-to-many desktop sharing, the model used currently by WebEx, Microsoft Live Meeting, and Adobe Acrobat Connect.Rosebud PLM announced yesterday that the U.S. Patent and Trademark office approved its model for simultaneous document collaboration between many different users.
The patent will be issued Nov. 18 and will be titled "Method and Software for Enabling N-way Collaboration Work over the Network for Computers," says former Sun developer and Rosebud CEO John Mohan.
The patent, Mohan says, covers interactive collaboration between users of many computers.
"With all of the collaboration [solutions] now, you're looking at one person's screen, and they transmit that screen to everybody who is part of the session—maybe it's your screen, maybe it's my screen, but you're looking at somebody's screen," Mohan says. Rosebud's server application replicates all participants' actions to all the other participants' screens.
Rosebud enables features like chat and real-time conferencing within PDF documents—as opposed to desktop sharing over a Web browser its competitors such as Acrobat Connect, WebEx and Live Meeting utilize.
Collaborating within Acrobat offers many advantages over Web browser collaboration such as speed, resolution, and zoom-in capabilities. Participants can enter comments and notes directly into PDF documents.
A current disadvantage of Rosebud is that it's an Acrobat plug-in, requiring all collaborators have the pricey Acrobat on their machines. Mohan says his company hopes to iron out a licensing agreement with Adobe to enable Rosebud to function as an Adobe Reader plug-in too, so collaborators can participate in Rosebud sessions with only a free download.
The application is in "early adopter" versions, which will be made compatible with Acrobat 9 in the coming weeks, Mohan says, as well as enable deeper Acrobat features such as tool settings for line width and color edits be shared across machines. This current upgrade was spurred by Morphosis, an architectural firm based in Santa Monica, CA using Rosebud to collaborate on building plans with customers.
During the six-year process of acquiring the patent, Rosebud had to demonstrate differences between its technology and that already patented by WebEx, IBM, and the U.S. Navy, Mohan says. The biggest challenge, he says, involved showing federal patent authorities substantial differences between Rosebud's collaboration model and that of a GE Healthcare medical imaging application.
"We had to overcome five IBM patents," Mohan says. "Looking back on it, at the time they came one at a time and you answered them, but you never got the full impact of what they threw at us. I could have given up any number of times in the process."
Mohan says that there likely are potential applications for the Rosebud technology outside of the Acrobat and PDF realm, but his company is unlikely to develop them.
"I hope there are," Mohan says. "We don't have any plans, but if somebody wants to do it, we'll let them fund it."
