TracBac is a Web2.0 visual collaboration tool that makes life easier for designers. It is targeted specifically at people whose creative lives revolve around images, e.g., ad agencies, web designers, visualisers etc. The process of creating designs/campaigns involves a lot of going back & forth between clients and reviewers. And is generally a painful process, with confusion prevailing over approvals, versions, last minute design changes etc. This is the area that TracBac tries to address.

TracBac has been created by a Chennai based interactive agency called 360 Degree Interactive. Besides being an interactive agency, 360Degrees is also leveraging its Web2.0 expertise to create a bunch of innovative, web based products. It is led by Narain, whom I met at the Chennai Barcamp in April earlier this year. He is a very spirited & enthusiastic guy and is actively involved with Chennai’s tech startup community.

So how does TracBac actually work? It is a hosted web service and its modus operandi revolves around tracking creative campaigns, that designers create after getting approvals from their clients. You can create a free account on TracBac and that entitles you to five campaigns. You can assign different reviewers to your campaigns. Once you upload the campaign, it is sent to the reviewer (by email alerts) for his/her approval. The reviewer sees the campaign in the reviewer’s interface (which is Macromedia Flash based). This has ‘Photoshop type’ visual tools for marking & reviewing, besides the ability to leave behind text msg, Post-It notes etc. Once the reviewer sends back his comments, along with the desired changes, the client can rework the campaign and send it back to the reviewer for the next iteration. TracBac has a tracking system, which makes it easy to manage the revisions. It saves you from the confusion, which is caused by the volley of emails going back and forth after each iteration. The reviewer also has the option of using some advanced tools, e.g. the ability to record & send audio messages, the ability to communicate synchronously with the client via IM (from within the reviewer’s interface). This results in less ambiguities and simplifies the collaborative process.

I created a test account on TracBac and tried out the tool. It works well and is quite easy to use. Narain informs me that they are going to releasing a major upgrade to TracBac very soon. I do feel that the application’s current look & feel could be further refined, to give it a more contemporary look.

TracBac is another example of how many innovative software products, are coming not from traditional software companies, but from ‘fringe’ players like design studios, usability companies, media companies etc. What I REALLY like about TracBac is that this is the only product of its kind that I am aware of, and is hence, an absolutely original product idea. 360 Degrees has a real chance to push this product and make it the ‘BaseCamp of visual collaboration’.

Zoho has launched a bunch of new features in the past few days that makes its weboffice suite more powerful than before. Here are the latest additions to its capabilities-

– normally office documents on the web need to be downloaded on to the computer and then opened with the native application. But Zoho has released a browser plugin called QuickRead, using which, it is possible to open documents, spreadsheets or presentations directly on the web without downloading the files. I installed QuickRead into my Firefox and tested it by opening a MS Word document; it worked fine (though there was some latency in the loading time). Check out this link for more on this.

– Zoho Writer has added category support for WordPress (and other metaWeblog API supported blogs), using which you can post to your blog directly from Zoho Writer. That’s very cool indeed.

– Zoho Sheet has added a functionality to embed charts or the spreadsheet itself, in your blog/website. If you want to see how it works, check out this link.

Rock on Zoho. All these features are ‘state of the art’ and you are probably leading the world in making these possible. I really marvel at the way your team is managing the development of so many different products simultaneously.