A New Tool for Technical Communicators: Coventi Pages— Interview with Peter Lee and Dan Wilson

TCW: Peter and Dan, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with us about your new software product aimed at technical communication pros. Before we get started, can you tell our readers a little about yourselves and your company, Coventi?

PL: Thank you Scott for this opportunity to tell your readers a bit about Coventi. The brief history is that Dan and I met at Stanford where we were both Computer Science grad students. Dan had been working on some great technology for annotating and discussing documents, which we’ve been building and refining into the Coventi Pages product over the past year.

DW: Yes, thanks Scott. So I’d say the root of what we do is give you control over the consensus-building process.

As technical communicators know very well, pulling together the different expertise and opinions of a group into a cohesive document can be a difficult thing to do. Our hope is that we’ve streamlined this process, and made it easy to collaborate even if everyone is spread out across the country, or the world.

TCW: Is Coventi Pages an installed software application...or is it a hosted solution, delivered over the web as Software as a Service SaaS)?

PL: Both, actually. A lot of our users prefer the convenience of SaaS, which we provide through the http://www.coventi.com website. But we also have a Server Edition available for installing on your own server, which we built for our corporate users who wanted the additional security of hosting documents on their corporate intranets. The key is that for the end user (the authors and reviewers) there’s no software to install or download. Just point your browser at Coventi and you’re ready to go.

TCW: Your company calls Coventi “a smarter way to share, discuss and revise documents.” Smarter than what?

PL: Well, if you’re familiar with the back-and-forth of email threads and too many sets of “track changes,” you probably agree that it’s a really painful way to collaborate on a document.

Traditional document management systems and even the newer collaborative authoring products try to fix this problem with revisioning and imposed workflows, but more often than not you still feel like you’re spending 90% of your effort trying to track down who said what, and to confirm that no one has any remaining issues.

TCW: Alright, but what is the differentiating factor between Coventi Pages and the rest of the pack. What’s the big difference between you and the “competition”?

PL: So our “special sauce” if you will is “Comments in Context.” This is that neat ability Dan was working on that lets you tie a conversation right to the context of a document. Since anyone in the group can reply, and their comments show up in real-time, it’s just like IM, but tied to the context of a document.

Where this becomes really powerful is when your reviewers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) disagree about a piece of text: you can step aside and let them hash out the change by talking to each other directly. There’s a great analogy we’ve heard of transitioning from “pilot” to “air traffic controller.”

Now imagine you have a whole bunch of these threads going on simultaneously, with your group zeroing in on each change they’d like you to make. Since each of these threads is tied to the context of the document, it’s easy to find exactly where you need to make the edit. And when you add in our capability to close out conversations and track which ones are still open, you have a built-in way to see exactly what items are remaining for a given document.

There are a lot of benefits for reviewers and SMEs too. Since all the conversation threads are captured and organized in one place, it’s easy to get up to speed on a document, even when you haven’t been tracking its progress continuously.

TCW: There appear to be several versions (free, professional, and server) of Coventi Pages. What are they and what do you get with each package? And, what are the prices of each?

DW: As Peter mentioned earlier, we offer both SaaS and installable ("Behind-the-firewall") versions of Coventi; you can have a look at our Products page for a complete breakdown. On the SaaS side, we have offer a free version that allows users to review documents, and a “Professional Edition” that allows users to author and review an unlimited number of documents for a monthly subscription fee of $12. With the SaaS version, we wanted to make sure that it was always free to review a document, so that authors could share documents without having to worry about payment on the other end.

The installable ("Behind-the-firewall") edition allows a corporate customer to host a Coventi Pages Server within their own intranet for $144/seat per year. Though our SaaS version is protected by SSL encryption and strict data backup/security policies, we’ve found that many larger companies are simply unwilling to store their documents outside the company firewall, and have unique requirements such as LDAP integration. We jumped at the opportunity to be an early-mover in the Enterprise 2.0 space, and are currently piloting the Server Edition at a Fortune 50 Company.

TCW: The Coventi website mentions using the product in ISO 9001 shops. How does Coventi Pages help organizations meet this international standard and what features help ensure compliance with document reviews?

DW: The ISO 9001 standard has a specific set of requirements for the control of documents within an organization. Throughout the lifecycle of the product, the organization needs to hold systematic reviews of all documentation to effectively control product quality at every stage of development. Alec Dorling, our contact in the ISO community, estimates that a full 80% of non-conformances found by auditors are related to document control, review, and approval.

Coventi is the absolute easiest way to hold an ISO 9001-compliant document review, for a few reasons. First off, the Coventi conversation list automates issue management and allows for targeted, precise discussion of specific sections of document content. Secondly, users can approve the document with one click to signal that their review is complete. Lastly, all review participants can download an offline copy of all comments and approvals for future reference.

Alec Dorling recently authored a whitepaper for TickIT International that explains why we’re the right tool for ISO 9001 shops.

TCW: Technical communication pros know that not all people learn the same way. Some folks read and learn. Others need to experience things to master them. Still others feel more comfortable watching a training video. Have you provided any video documentation to help people better understand how Coventi Pages works?

DW: We have a video that gives a very detailed demonstration of our product, and most users tell us that they’re ready to start using Coventi after one viewing. You can watch it by clicking the “Video Demo” link on our front page. We used Adobe Captivate to capture and edit, and are pleased with the results.

TCW: While Coventi Pages certainly looks interesting, most technical content creators are moving away from MS Word and toward authoring content in XML. What document types does Coventi support today and what are you doing to provide XML support in the future?

PL: Right now we support the MS Word format and OpenDocument Text for upload and download, as well as PDF for download. Our goal is to expand to other formats and XML support would certainly be high on the list.

TCW: The hottest document standard by far is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). It’s an XML specification for describing and organizing topic-based content. And, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is working to expand its use into the world of business documents. They’ve even set up a new OASIS committee dedicated to DITA and business docs. Does Coventi support DITA?

PL: Not yet, but we would be interested in hearing back from the Content Wrangler community on what you would like to see from Coventi in terms of DITA support. And if anyone is willing to participate in a user interview about how you use DITA in your organization that would be hugely helpful. Please send an email to with your contact information.

TCW: Mining unstructured, semi-structured, and structured content is not yet commonplace in many organizations. By combining various types of data together, we can harvest, sort, compare, and contrast various types of data and combine them together to provide business value. What does the future hold for data mining? And, how can these new approaches help businesses see trends or patterns that are not readily evident otherwise?

DW: One interesting thing about Coventi is that it captures the group decision-making process. The document itself represents the decisions that were finally made by the group, but conversations tied to the document expose exactly why those decisions were made. This is critical information that today is most often obscured by an email thread that takes place outside the context of the document, or is lost entirely after a telephone call.

In Coventi, this data is stored and indexed in a separate Conversation database. In the future, we’re planning to provide our users with data mining capabilities that will allow the data that drove past decisions to shed light on current work efforts.

TCW: Online content authoring tools like Coventi can help organizations accomplish many business challenges. Can you tell us about a few of your clients and what business problems they are solving with Coventi?

PL: We should definitely tell you about Camille Jensen, an organizational communications consultant based in Alberta, Canada. She recently used Coventi to work with a group of oil and gas safety supervisors spread across the province to write a set of Industry Recommended Practice manuals.

Coventi allowed her to focus on creating a well-written document, while relying on her SMEs to provide the technical expertise.

Robert Prisby and the American Concrete Pavement Association is another great example of how a distributed team came together to write a high-quality document using Coventi. His 11-person investigative team was hired by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to do an analysis of concrete damage due to winter weather at over 100 sites across the state. Coventi allowed the whole group to provide input, take ownership of their comments and recommendations and create a high-quality analysis.

If your readers are interested in reading more user stories, they’re available on our website.

TCW: Moving to a collaborative authoring environment is technologically possible today. However, just because the technology is ready for prime time does not mean that knowledge workers have the skills needed to use these new tools. What challenges have you seen amongst new customers? What are some of the problems they report moving to a collaborative authoring process? And, what legacy - MS Word-based - habits are hardest for your customers to break?

PL: Probably the hardest habit to break is our reliance on email. It’s such a great way to fire off a quick message that we tend to rely on it to do more than it was intended.

It’s easy enough to send out a quick bullet list outline for a new document over email. But what happens when people disagree about one or two or all the points? And what if there are too many scheduling conflicts to have a face-to-face meeting? How do you keep track of all the different threads over email? How will you know that everyone’s been included?

The real advantage of Coventi is that all of this stuff is tracked automatically; you really just need to use it and the “tracking” comes along for free.

TCW: One last question. What should our readers expect from Coventi in the future? Turn up your crystal ball and make a few predictions for 2008.

PL: Usability is our biggest priority. So far we’ve been hearing that the site is pretty easy to learn, and the video helps quite a bit. So we’ll put part of our focus this upcoming year on integrating Coventi more tightly with the tools we already use (like email) so that it really becomes a part of the knowledge worker’s toolset, and that it’s always “at hand” when you need it.

DW: Another top priority will be to seek partnerships with companies interested in integrating the Coventi workflow into their offerings. Lightweight, web-based word processing was an excellent place for us to start, but it’s clear from our user interviews and market research that our collaboration features would be valuable for a much wider range of applications. We’ll be looking to partner wherever possible.

TCW: Thanks for sharing your knowledge and psychic predictions for the future with our readers. We really appreciate your time and effort.

PL: Thank you Scott, for this opportunity to tell you all a bit about Coventi. We’d encourage everyone to check out the site at http://www.coventi.com, and to shoot us an email at with any feedback, or if you need help setting up Coventi Pages for your organization.

DW: Thanks Scott, it was our pleasure.