Today we’re launching Amium, a collaboration tool that brings real-time activity feeds and conversations to any file — whether it’s a document, a spreadsheet, a Photoshop design file, or any other file type.

But before I tell you more about the what, let me tell you why.

The promise of file syncing has been, amongst other things, a better way to collaborate. But it turns out that while file syncing tools are great at keeping your own files in sync, they’re actually terrible at answering three particular questions at the heart of collaboration:

What changed?

Why did it change?

Where is the change?

When we use a file syncing tool to collaborate, we imagine that the process will look roughly like this: We create a file, save it to a shared folder, and it will sync to the other person’s devices, allowing them to work on it:

In reality, once we hit save, the process of collaboration is usually just beginning.

Once we’ve created or updated the file, we need to inform the other person(s) of the changes we made, and why we made them. So we hop into our favorite communication tool (email, messaging, IM, etc.) and send them a note along with a link, or worse, an attachment, to that file.

What happens next is that most of the actual collaboration takes place almost exclusively outside of the file sharing tool:

The person downloads the attachment or link, works on it, uploads it, and this back-and-forth continues until you’re satisfied with the result, at which point you’ve hopefully (maybe?) placed the file back into your file sharing tool.

We asked many of our customers at AeroFS (our own file syncing tool), as well as customers of other solutions, and even our team internally how they collaborate, and the above scenario played out over and over again. So we asked them why?

The reason distills to one particular point: We need to talk about the files/work.

Traditionally this collaboration was done in a separate medium from where the work was actually done. In essence, we would bring the files wherever we’re having a conversation.

But, what if we could do it differently?

What if instead we could leave the files exactly where they are, avoid duplication, and bring the conversation to the files?