Search Results for: wikis

Enterprise 3.0: Where Is It Headed? – Interesting Panel with the Wrong Title

Posted on August 13, 2007 ·

I’m not a big fan of the whole 2.0 /3.0 theme, but I have to accept the fact that Web 2.0 and related concepts have become commonplace, everyday terms that today we’re taking for granted. Enterprise 2.0, on the other hand is far more debated. Definitions range from loosely saying “Web 2.0 tools in the Enterprise” through Harvard Prof Andrew McAfee’s “Use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers” to MR Rangaswami’s much broader “ synergy of a new set of technologies , development models and delivery methods that are used to develop business software and deliver it to users.” Then we have a set of attempts to simply “get to the point”, without long academic debate, like lightweight software, or Meet Charlie, a simple yet effective slideshow that personalizes the story.

One thing there is agreement about is that there is no agreement – in terms of a definition, that is… but that does not prevent us from attending conferences like Enterprise 2.0 or Office 2.0, and more importantly, businesses from embracing Enterprise 2.0 to varying degrees. It is happening, whether we have a “final” definition or not.

However, I really don’t think we’re ready for Enterprise 3.0 – not now, not ever. There are quite a few articles on the subject, but they all come from the same author, Sramana Mitra (except for two old ZDNet articles quoting Shai Agassi and JP Rangaswami). Sramana has certainly “cornered” the market – except there really is no “market” if she’s the only one using the term. Her definition: Enterprise 3.0 = SaaS + EE. What’s EE? Extended Enterprise:

The modern enterprise is no longer one, monolithic organization. Customers, Partners, Suppliers, Outsourcers, Distributors, Resellers, … all kinds of entities extend and expand the boundaries of the enterprise, and make “collaboration” and “sharing” important.

Let’s take some examples. The Salesforce needs to share leads with distributors and resellers. The Product Design team needs to share CAD files with parts suppliers. Customers and Vendors need to share workspace often. Consultants, Contractors, Outsourcers often need to seamlessly participate in the workflow of a project, share files, upload information. All this, across a secure, seamlessly authenticated system.

Sounds familiar? Of course, back in the 90’s this is what we called (Extended) Supply Chain. I’m not sure we need to create another label just yet. But if and when something is so significant that it deserves a new name, let’s get a bit more creative … I’m with fellow Enterprise Irregular Thomas Otter, who humorously ranted:

The car isn’t called horse 2.0.

The lightbulb isn’t called candle 2.0

Fax (Facsimile) isn’t called letter 2.0

If we are so innovative in the 21st century, the least we can do is to think of some new terms that inspire. Think ROBOT, Television, Velcro, Radio, even scuba (Self-Contained Underwater-Breathing Apparatus) … If this stuff is really that innovative then it deserves a proper word.

Back to Sramana and “Enterprise 3.0”: next week she will be moderating a panel discussion of the MIT Club of Northern California, with the ambitious title: Enterprise 3.0: Where Is It Headed?. Excerpt from the event description:

Collaboration, wikis, blogs and social networking are new tools igniting the enterprise market. Service based models are emerging as alternates to desktop software and enterprise servers. In March 2007, Cisco acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion, stepping in with a splash in the enterprise collaboration space. Meanwhile, Google has assembled a whole suite of word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet tools and just acquired Postini, an email management company. Microsoft has been adding collaboration and knowledge management capabilities to its Windows Platform and just announced plans to offer Web-based versions of its applications. Then, there are exciting startups that are offering alternatives.

This panel will explore the impact of Web 2.0 on the prosumer i.e. the individual user in the enterprise and the evolution and integration of office tools, communication and collaboration technologies.

Sounds vintage Enterprise 2.0, if you ask me. That said, I think it’s an exciting subject, and they will certainly have a first-rate panel:

Tom Cole, General Partner, Trinity Ventures
Cliff Reeves, GM, Emerging Business Unit Team, Microsoft
Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Docs and Spreadsheets
~~Sridhar Vembu, Founder, CEO, Zoho / Adventnet~~ last minute change: the event site now lists Tim Harvey, VP Planning, Webex, Cisco Systems instead of Sridhar Vembu.

Whatever we call it, I plan to be there. If you are reading this blog, chances are you’re also interested in these subjects, so if you happen to be in the Bay Area Wednesday evening, perhaps I’ll see you there. Here’s the registration page. (Warning: the form is way too long, asking for way too much information – vintage 1.0 style)

Additional reading: Open Gardens, Portals and KM, Anne Zelenka, Luis Suarez, the FASTForward Blog, Read/WriteWeb, Chris Pirillo, Fake Steve Jobs , just to name a few…

Update (8/21): as much as I hate this 2.0-3.0 labeling, I like Don Dodge’s new formula: Web 2.0 = web app + 2 founders + 0 revenue

Filed Under: Bay Area, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Social Networking · Tagged: Collaboration, emergent enterprise, enterprise 2.0, enterprise 3.0, Extended Enterprise, Google, microsoft, MIT, MIT Club, SaaS, Social Networking, Social Software, Supply Chain, web 2.0, web 3.0, zoho

Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle

Posted on July 23, 2007 ·

I do not think/work/create like a machine.

My thoughts flow freely and I tend to discover relationships between events (hence “Connecting the Dots” above in the Blog Header), so I like linking things – at least mentally. Why would I confine myself to the rigid directory & file structure that computers have forced on us for decades? There are better ways… let’s look at some.

A while ago Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote and excellent piece on how Enterprise Wikis Replace Shared Drives. Shared drives as collective document depositories are a disaster, we typically can’t determine where, to put things, and certainly don’t know where to find them. And if we do find a document, how do we know whether we have the latest version? How do we know who changed what in the dozen other copies with similar but cryptic filenames spread around the shared drive?

Wouldn’t it be easier to use the equivalent of a directory structure with meaningful names, the ability to attach longer narratives to our documents and find them easily via search and tags? That’s essentially what you get when you use an enterprise wiki as your “shared drive”. Think of not documents/files only, but the very reason they exist: in business we typically work on a few “projects” at any one time. If we create wikis / wiki pages for each project / function, the page content becomes the “narrative” that describes what we do, why and how, and further supporting details are in the document attachments. There really is no reason to bury documents (doc, xls, ppt) in some central dumping place (document depository) anymore – they belong to the wiki page (project description) where by definition they are in context. Of course they can be used in several other places, in different context, which is where linking comes handy – linking to wiki pages as well as other content (documents, web sites, etc).

Now that we established the wiki as the “glue” to tie all our documents together, let’s take a step further. As we get comfortable with the wiki, we’ll often wonder when to create a separate document and when to use native wiki pages. If your wiki supports a rich word processor, textual content can easily move in the wiki pages themselves. (Interestingly, Blogtronix, the Enterprise 2.0 platform vendor uses the “document” metaphor for what others call a wiki-page.) Of course whether we call them pages or documents, they should still be easy to share with “outsiders”, by using workspace or page-level permissions, or exporting to PDF and other file formats should you need to “detach” content and email it.
This works well for text, while for other needs we shoot out to the point applications and attach the resulting files (ppt, xls… etc.)

However, like I stated before, I do see the irony of working in an online collaboration platform (the wiki) yet having to upload/download attachments. Atlassian’s Webdav plugin for Confluence is an elegant solution (edit offline, save directly to the wiki), but for most other wikis the process involves far too many steps. Why not directly edit all these documents online? This of course takes us to the old debate whether the wiki should become the new office, or just the “integrator” holding the many pieces together. As a user, I don’t see why I should care: I just want seamless workflow between my wiki, spreadsheet, presentation manager, project management tool …etc. Such integration is easier when all applications/documents are online, and there are excellent applications from Zoho, ThinkFree, Editgrid, Google, to do just that.

Working directly on the Web is not just a matter of convenience. Zoho’s Raju Vegesna points to mobility, sharing & collaboration, presence & communication, auto-Versioning, auto-save, access & edit history as native benefits of web-documents.

As we link web documents to each other, and smoothly transition between applications, a paradigm shift occurs: the definition of what we call a “document” expands. Offline, a document equals a file, defined by application constraints. Spreadsheets, presentations need to be saved in their own specific format, and they become “black boxes”: there’s not much we know about them, other than a short title. There is an overhead in opening every one of them, they need to be virus-checked, then “stitched” together to support the “flow-thinking” I was referring to earlier.
Those boundaries are stretched on the web: a document is no longer a file of a specific type, generated by a specific application: it’s a logical unit, defined by context, which weaves together content created by several applications.

Zoho’s Notebook is an experimental application that allows us to create, merge and store information the way we think, no matter whether it involves writing text, drawing charts, shapes, crunching numbers or recording/playing videos. Experimental in the sense that we don’t know how it will be used. In fact I don’t know what the future web worker productivity / collaboration tools will look like, but I suspect they will have elements of Notebook – multi-format, multi-media – and wikis – user-created structure, everything linked to everything – merged together.

Files, formats become irrelevant: there is only one format, and it’s the Web, defined by URL’s.

Additional reading:

Update (11/13/07): Read I Hate Files on Collaboration Loop. (via Stewart Mader)

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: atlassian, Collaboration, confluence, directories, documents, office 2.0, Online Applications, Web Applications, web documents, web office, wiki, zoho, Zoho Notebook

Web 2.0 Wiki Essentials Kit Served up 1.0 Style

Posted on July 17, 2007 ·

Socialtext, the enterprise wiki company offers a free Wiki Essentials kit for download. It includes a basic wiki-intro, two analyst briefs and several customer case studies. Of course all of them Socialtext-flavored, but that’s quite understandable, and I think the package is a valuable intro into how corporations can use wikis – just replace Socialtext with “enterprise wiki” and do your own research.

What I’m not too happy with is the way these web 2.0 goodies are served up in good old “1.0-style”.

Registration form. Ouch! This is where I normally quit, but since I wanted to report about it, I patiently filled out all the fields. Sorry for the phone no. 111-111-1111, but some of you at Socialtext have my real number… I understand this is part of a sales-push, but believe me, it’s also a turn-off for many. Why not just be the nice guys (and gals), serve up information, and provide your contact form at the end of each doc? Which brings me to the next point…
Download. Unzip. Deal with several PDF files. This is so un-cool and 1990’s. Why not make them available online? In fact, why not link the individual documents to each other? Wait… wouldn’t that be a … wiki?

(P.S. I’d like to make the point that this is good info, I’m just teasing ST for not delivering it 2.0-style)

Update (7/19): There is indeed on online site Cases2.com, which is not a 100% overlap: it does not have the analyst writeups, but Harvard Prof. Andrew McAfee expects it to grow into Case Study Central” . It’s open for contribution by anyone – the Web 2.0 way. (hat tip: Ross Mayfield)

Tags: Socialtext, wiki, wikis, enterprise 2.0, wiki essentials, sales, sales 2.0, marketing, cases2.com

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Marketing / PR ·

Peer to Patent Project Live

Posted on June 18, 2007 ·

I previously wrote about New York Law School professor Beth Noveck’s experiment to create a Wikipedia-like system that allows outside peer reviewers participate in the patent examination / review process.

Why? It’s really simple: the US Patent Office is overwhelmed, it has very few examiners with deep knowledge of tax law, especially of “creative technics” – just like it feels outdated in technology, software issues. Add to this the explosion in the number of patent applications “leaving examiners only 20 hours on average to comb through a complex application, research past inventions, and decide whether a patent should be granted.”

In an unlikely cooperation of Government, technology giants like IBM & HP and Academia, the Peer to Patent Project launched last Friday. The new system already has a “competitor”, in the form of a private initiative, Wikipatents.com.

It’s great to see wikis put to good use

Details on CNet.

Tags: patents, patent system, frivolous patents, patent office, uspto, patent abuse, wikis, wiki, wikipedia, social+computing, patent+review, patent+examiners, wikipatents

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Technology ·

Software 2007: Plattner to Turn the SAP Mothership Again

Posted on May 9, 2007 ·

For half an hour or so I felt I was back at University at Software 2007 – in Professor Hasso Plattner’s class. That’s because his keynote was a compressed version of his recent SAPPHIRE 07 speech, which in turn was an “offsite class” for his Stanford students – literally so, he flew the entire class out to Atlanta. To make his point, he used the blackboard-metaphor, with chalked handwriting (and dressed in matching black).

I don’t normally enjoy keynotes, but found this one fascinating: it was about a lot more than most in the audience thinks – more on this later…

The “lecture” was about his New Idea for enterprise software – more than an idea, it started as a side-project about 5 years ago, then about 3 years ago they realized they can’t do it with one codebase.. so it became a completely separate system from SAP’s current business suite. They kept the project secret as long as they could, but this year they started to talk about it: it’s code-named A1S, and currently 3000 people are working on it (For comparison, Salesforce.com has less than 200 engineers). It will be On-Demand, and not a point-solution, but a full-featured, integrated business solution, as one would expect from SAP.

Some of my raw notes on the key concepts:

On-demand: Google, Salesforce.com showed it works. Time now for the whole enterprise to run in the cloud. Very small footprint at customer.
New markets: small business customers.
Key difference: user-centric design. Iteration, version 7 of user interface already, it will be 8 or 9 before it launches. Every single functions delivered either by browser or smart client. They look 100% identical. Office (MS) client, Mobile, too.
Separation of UI, App, Db – physical sep, multiple UI’s for same App. Front ends very specific to industries. Portal based. Company, departmental portal. User roles. Multiple workplaces. In smaller companies users have multiple workplaces. High degree of personalization.
Event driven approach. Model based system. Instead of exposing source code, expose the model. Not just documentation, active models. Change system behavior through models. Very different from SAP’s original table-based customization. Completely open to access by/ to other system. 2500+ service interfaces exposed.
The future of software design will be driven by community. SDN 750K members, 4000 posts per day. We’ll have hundreds of thousands of apps from the community. Blogs, Wikis, Youtube.
In-memory databases. Test: 5years accounting, 36 million line items. 20G in file 1.1G compressed in memory. Any question asked > 1.1sec. There is no relational database anymore. Database can be split over multiple computers. Finally information will be in the user’s fingertips. Google-speed for all Enterprise information. Analytics first, eventually everything in memory.

For a more organized writeup, I recommend Dan Farber’s excellent summary, and for the full details watch the original SAPPHIRE 07 Keynote (after a bit of salesy intro).

As it became obvious during the post-keynote private press/blogger discussion, most in the room thought Plattner was talking about the mysterious A1S, SAP’s yet-to-be-seen On-Demand SMB offering – although he made it clear he intentionally never used the A1S moniker. I think what we heard was a lot more – but to understand it, one has understand Hasso Plattner himself. No matter how his formal position changed, the last active SAP Founder has always been the Technology Visionary behind the company – the soul of SAP, it there is such a thing. He is not a product-pusher, not a marketer: he sets direction for several years ahead.

SAP has an existing (legacy) market to protect, and they clearly don’t want the On-Demand product to cannibalize that market. But Plattner knows On-Demand is coming, and I bet the SMB space will be the test-bed to the new system eventually “growing up” to all of SAP’s market segments. Hasso Plattner gets the On-Demand religion, and when he gets a new religion, SAP typically follows. Plattner oversaw two major paradigm changes: the move from mainframe to client/server, which was entirely his baby, and the move to SOA/Netweaver, where he embraced Shai Agassi’s initiatives. The ‘New Idea” will likely be the last time Plattner turns the Mothership around. Next he will need to find “another Shai” to make sure there is a strong tech DNA in SAP’s leadership, as the Sales/Marketing types take over at the helm.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME, Social Networking, Software, Technology · Tagged: A1S, Enterprise Software, erp, Hasso Plattner, keynote, On-Demand, Plattner, SaaS, sap, SAPPHIRE07, smb, sme, Software2007

iGoogle, but Which One? Time to Fix the Google Apps Chaos…

Posted on May 1, 2007 ·

(Updated)

Now that they got a snazzy name (whatever happened to Google’s naming convention of coming up with beauties like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Docs & Spreadsheets & Presentations & Wikis, & insert-new-product-here? ) perhaps it’s time to eliminate the chaos Google caused by sloppy implementation of the otherwise great Google Apps service.

If you’re not familiar with the latter, I strongly suggest reading David Berlind’s excellent overview at ZDNet. He concludes that there are two parallel Google-worlds: the consumer, public one we all know, and one that’s being built somewhat under the radar, allowing businesses to customize their own domain, maintain users, security, business email, calendar, documents – essentially white-labeling Google’s applications.

That’s all great, except that access to the private-domain features is accidental at best – let me share my experience. When I signed up, I linked my own domain to may existing Google Account, which is tied to a Gmail address. Now I’m a happy gmail user while preserving my own domain. So far so good – trouble starts trying to access any other Google Apps.

I can easily get to them by direct URL’s in the form of calendar.mydomain.com, docs.mydomain.com …etc – but what happens when I try to *really* use them, say, import a calendar entry from upcoming.org, zvents, or any event site? The “old” calendar at myname@gmail.com comes up as default.
Recently I tried installing the Etelos CRM add-on to Google – guess what, it went to the personalized homepage (now iGoogle) at myname@gmail.com and I had no way to force it to install at start.mydomain.com – which is attached to the same Google account.
What about Gmail and Google Docs integration? If you use your “regular” gmail account and receive a Microsoft Word/Excel document, there’s an option to view them as a Google Doc or Spreadsheet. The first few times I tried to use the same option from my branded gmail account (name@mydomain.com) I got a “document not found” error. Google must have realized the trouble, they now removed the “View as Google Doc” option from Google Apps email.
Even the otherwise excellent Google Groups is messed up: when I am logged in as name@mydomain.com, Google Groups I am a member of with this account won’t recognize me. I actually have to have duplicate identities created in Google Groups: one to be able to send email (my own domain) and one to be able to access Group’s other features via the browser (@gmail format).

Perhaps it’s obvious by now that the trouble is not with the individual applications. The Google Accounts concept is a total chaos. It creates a dual identity, and while I can always access the private-label Google Apps via direct URL, in a short while the default pops up its nasty head and the original, public (@gmail) format and applications take over. Net result: I gave up trying to use Google Apps, except for Gmail. And I can’t help but agree with this TechCrunch commenter:

“…Instead I have this hamstrung barely functional thing where my login refuses to work anywhere else on Google and none of the apps have a link back to the portal page! So much for Single Sign On. And forget importing from an existing account in any slick way. A huge missed opportunity whilst the waste time playing with logos and bad branding on /ig”

Now, on a less serious note, back to the naming issue: If (when?) Google’s phone comes out, will it be an iPhone? After all, Steve Jobs has just demonstrated that being first does not matter…

Update (5/7/2007): I’ve been wondering why there was no huge outcry because of the above – after all it renders some apps quite useless. Now I understand: apparently you can now sign up for Google Apps directly with your domain, without having to tie it to a pre-existing Google Account. This is good news, since a lot less users are affected. This is also bad news, for the very same reason: less users, less pressure to fix it, so the early Beta users are stuck…

Update (1/20/08): I think it is fixed now.

The Official Google Blog, Google Blogoscoped, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, parislemon, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Techscape, VentureBeat, Micro Persuasion, Reuters, Search Engine Land, Googling Google, PC World: Techlog, Search Engine Roundtable, WebMetricsGuru,, Read/WriteWeb…

Tags: google, google apps, google Groups, google docs & spreadsheets, google accounts, gmail, igoogle.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME ·

Conservapedia: an Exclusionist Wikipedia-Clone

Posted on March 5, 2007 ·

And I thought Wikipedia’s deletionists were exclusionist. Oh, boy, was I wrong… the real exclusionists created their own Wikipedia-clone:

“Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American… Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America.”

How can it possibly be an objective source of “historical, scientific, legal, and economic topics” by excluding the views of the majority of the World?

As for Christianity and America, I hate to bring this to the Conservafolks, but Christianity really, really did not originate in America. Not that Conservapedia’s entry on Christianity explains anything – you’ll have to check out Wikipedia for that.

Conservapedia doesn’t fare any better on the *minor* [sic] contribution to history, science, culture, architecture ..etc by pre-Christian civilizations like Egypt, China, Greece ..etc. For example here’s the entire entry on Egypt:

“The oldest non-nomadic civilization in the world which still exists today. Egypt is located in north-east Africa. ”

Greece does not do any better:

“The collective term for the civilizations of the Greek subcontinent.”

Nice. Concise? Pathetic.

Conservapedia started as a school project. (Again, we have to visit Wikipedia, not Conservapedia to learn this). I’m sure eliminating diversity, filtering out most of the World’s knowledge is the best way to improve our kids’ education. As if America were not already falling behind in education. My advice to the Conservafolks: get Senator Ted Stevens on board.

Tags: wikipedia, conservapedia, religion, christianity, diversity, wikis, bigotry, conservatism, exclusionism

Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Misc, Politics, Software, Technology ·

Box.net + Zoho: Another Step Towards Seamless On/Offline Computing

Posted on February 3, 2007 ·

Well, we did not have to wait long: barely two weeks after Omnidrive announced their integration with the Zoho online applications, competitor Box.net followed suite: they now support online editing via Zoho Writer. The result of the edit process will be saved back to your Box as a .doc file.

Box CEO Aaron Levie assures me this is just the start of many future integration projects, which is great. After all, it should not matter where a document starts its life: I should be able to access and work on it online or offline.

I fully expect other services to join the camp: For example, the better business-class wikis all handle document attachments, but to edit those docs you still need to download, edit, save, upload back up again – way too cumbersome, why not enable online editing? And if you read Tim Barker’s comments to my writeup on Koral, you can expect this amazingly easy content collaboration system to offer online editing soon.

P.S. Aaron, I’m still waiting for that sync

Additional posts: /Message, CenterNetworks, Web Worker Daily,

Tags: zoho, box.net, omnidrive, on/offline, wiki, koral, collaboration, online backup, online storage, office 2.0

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·

Koral – Collaborative Content Management without the Hassle of "Management"

Posted on January 29, 2007 ·

My regular readers know I’m a big fan of wikis. There is just no better way for collaborative group work. If I started a company today, we’d have a wiki from Day 1. Gartner predicts 50% penetration to business by the end of 2009 – that’s Gartner, that’s only 50% and that’s 3 years away. That leaves a large number of businesses unserved, and a huge opportunity to enable them to collaborate without changing the way they work.

Today the #1 productivity platform in business is still Microsoft Office. A typical “knowledge worker” creates documents, spreadsheets, presentations on her/his desktop, tries to maintain order by diligently filing them under an ever-growing directory-structure and shares the information by emailing the files around. When several co-workers need to contribute to a document, version chaos ensues. Document management systems are supposed to ease the pain, but they are big, expensive, and surprisingly (?) only 5% of office workers actually use them.

Koral, a content collaboration startup debuted a few months ago has a strong change to change it all. It pursues a very simple idea: allow users to share information, give them access to the most recent version of all documents, whether the latest update is on their desktop or someone elses, and guide them with several popularity/ usage indicators, i.e. most accessed documents, most active contributors, best rated experts ..etc – do it all without forcing users to change how they work today.

They can continue individually working on their desktops, and all they have to do is drag the documents to be stored into Koral’s drop-box on their desktop. The document is instantly uploaded, fully indexed, auto-tagged based on content, and for certain document types (for now PPT) flash previews are generated. The user does not have to be logged on to the web-based system, although doing so allows for additional categorization, tagging, permissioning:

All this information becomes the foundation of easy document retrieval. Gone is the directory jungle where files are replicated and lost: it’s all about tagging and powerful search. Search, which can based on simple keywords, boolean expressions, or multi-step, clustered search where a friendly interface helps the user create further filters based on content, file formats, tags, categories, author ..etc until the number of matching documents comes down to a handful – at which point the online previews come handy.

Once you found what you’re looking for, you can download your document, or subscribe to it, giving you alerts any time the document is updated. The subscription mechanism goes beyond just notification: it’s the foundation of document synchronization. Koral places a tracker the local (desktop) document, so it will know who has what version at any time. When you access a local document – open it, or even attach it to an email – Koral will warn you if you don’t have the most recent version (i.e. someone else has updated it online) and of course offers to replace your old copy.

Sync goes a step further: how often do a few “core slides” get replicated in dozens of corporate presentations? Or a key spreadsheet embedded in various other documents and slides? Koral can refresh all these second-generation documents when the core slide/spreadsheet changes – i.e. your numbers are magically updated.

Stepping beyond traditional document management there are a number of social networking / bookmarking features: documents can be rated, commented on.

The document summary page above shows the average rating, number of users who rated the document, number of downloads and subscribers, and comments, on top of the standard document attributes like creation date, author, version number.

Koral is currently piloting a version with select customers where they can provide ranking statistics based on some of the above information: most frequently read, downloaded, subscribed document, most discussed document, most popular post or author, most popular tags ..etc. Needless to say you can subscribe to authors, tags, categories, not just individual documents. All this essentially supports better information discovery rather than just explicit search for information you already know exists.

Finally, some of the best applications are when you don’t even notice you’re working with Koral: users of Salesforce.com can discover related documents and attach them to the lead / opportunity record without ever leaving the salesforce.com environment.

Talk about mashups …Koral itself is a “bridge” product, enhancing the productivity of largely offline users (working in MS Office) by offering an online service. I would love to see them move further on the offline/online continuum by offering online tools to not only preview but actually edit documents online – the recent Zoho-Omnidrive mashup is a good precedent to follow.

For additional information, check out the demo video by Tim Barker, VP Products, and Robert Scoble’s interview with CEO Mark Suster.

Tags: koral, microsoft office, ms office, ecm, content management, document management, content collaboration, collaboration, saaS, search, content discovery, salesforce.com, zoho, office 2.0

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Startups ·