Server-Free Collaborative Content Management Solution For Every Desktop, Workgroup And Project Team
Content Circles, a leading provider of distributed content management and collaboration solutions, recently announced the availability of Content Circles 1.0, the flagship solution that revolutionizes the way people collaborate and manage content across companies.
Content Circles 1.0 represents a revolutionary new approach to enabling distributed and mobile teams to collaboratively create, share, and manage documents within and among companies and organizations on a worldwide basis.
Content management solutions have traditionally been IT intensive tools that required significant resources to install and support large, complex server-based software configurations. These legacy solutions require significant training and are cumbersome for modern workgroups and project teams. Today's workgroups and teams are often distributed across companies, highly mobile, and must quickly assemble around key tasks and need easy, secure access to the right documents at the right time.
Web-based solutions eliminate the IT resource issues but still expensive, require significant training and cumbersome to use. More importantly, they require companies to put all of their confidential documents on the web exposing the companies to significant security as well as business continuity risks.
Email represents the low-end attempt to manage documents in a workgroup, but the tool is completely inadequate for the task. Email is neither secure, nor has the ability to track and handle revisions to documents or rights management of a group, and often doesn't work due to file size and storage limitations.
User and workgroup-centric content management is the key to Content Circles. The company understood that unless the solution could be set up and used by virtually any computer user, there would not be broad acceptance and adoption. Some of the key elements of the solution include:
- Instant replication of shared content across users computers
- Unlimited file size, storage and usage
- Online and offline access to all content
- 100% confidential, secure, and spam/ad free
- Role-based access control
- Version management, including comments per each version
- Content synchronization with other repositories including Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs, FTP Servers and Network Drives
- Cross-platform application runs on Mac and PC
- Simple one-click, server-free download and installation – No IT required
- Cost-effective subscription pricing model similar to Web conferencing
"Content Circles is an impressive, easy-to-use content collaboration tool that enables cross-company teams to securely collaborate on important documents", said Steve Kirsch, serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of several successful companies including Abaca, Infoseek and Frame Technology. "Setup and installation is very simple and needs no IT support. Within a few minutes you can securely start sharing, editing and reviewing confidential documents with people around the world. Content Circles has become an important productivity tool among my colleagues".
Bringing Viral Distribution to Content Management
The company founders realized that well established models of viral software distribution were a perfect fit for Content Circles. Products such as WebEx and Adobe Acrobat adopted models that allow free usage of and access to a broad array of content created through their networks and those of their customers. Revenue is derived from workgroup leaders and content creators. The Content Circles model takes advantage of the best and most proven elements of these models. Anyone can open and view documents created by a "Circle" owner in a Circle they have been invited to participate in. Participants in a circle can even add content to the circle. A recurring subscription fee is only assessed when an individual needs to create and invite participants to a circle they need to control.
This strategy utilizes the best elements of the business model that dictates that a company should demonstrate significant value to prospects before ever assessing a fee for use. This is the essence of the recurring subscription revenue model: Demonstrate your customer value every day.
"Content Circles is an extremely flexible, secure and easy to use collaboration tool for distributed teams", said John Capurso, Vice President, Marketing, Visioneer. "I was very impressed by how quickly we were able to set up and use Content Circles to share, manage, edit, and review large files with a geographically dispersed team. Content Circles was up and running in a few minutes and needed no IT support. The application is now a key part of our team's daily workflow process."
Distributed Content Management Market
Content Management is a huge and growing market. Analysts have discussed the opportunity for distributed content management for some time, but no vendors have yet addressed the market with an effective solution. Forrester found that 68% of survey respondents for The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2007 research report were either investing in or upgrading their content management solutions, outpacing planned expenditures in other IT areas.
Gartner Consulting studied the evolving market for content management as far back as 2001, "Distributed content management systems address the need to access content wherever it resides, produce content while maintaining control over it, and collaborate efficiently by sharing data real-time within a distributed network of stakeholders. These systems create virtual content repositories that eliminate the need for structured storage. In fact, with these systems, data structure becomes irrelevant because information is accessed at its source, in its native format, expanding the reach and participation of stakeholders." Gartner Consulting: The Emergence of Distributed Content Management and Peer-to-Peer Content Networks, January 2001. Despite all of this attention, the large players have continued to focus on their centralized server-based offerings.
Content Circles team brought years of enterprise content management and collaboration experience to address the distributed content management challenge. "Our team recognized that the traditional enterprise server-centric solutions simply did not address the content management and collaboration needs of today's distributed and mobile workgroups", said Sri Chilukuri, CEO and co-founder of Content Circles. "Having developed enterprise content management and collaboration systems for years, we knew what was needed was a simple and secure system that works like people do today – anytime, anywhere, right on their own computers."
About Content Circles
Content Circles is an innovative provider of secure, easy to use content management and collaboration solutions for distributed teams that span departments, divisions and companies. Content Circles is headquartered in Mountain View, CA. For more information visit www.contentcircles.com.
SOURCE: Content Circles