Inmagic provides a comprehensive knowledge management and collaboration application called Social Knowledge Networks. It began in the corporate library management space in 1983 and grew up with knowledge management and now Enterprise 2.0. I wrote about them before on this blog (see Inmagic Presto 3.0 Adds Social Components to Knowledge Management Platform).  Recently, I spoke with Phil Green, CTO, and Mike Cassettari, VP of Marketing, about their latest moves with the release of Presto 3.3.

Mike began with some background on their corporate strategy. Inmagic originally targeted the corporate research and library functions with a knowledge management offering. Now they are moving into the broader enterprise market.  They felt that many of the information management applications focused more on the content producer and left the content user without robust information access and collaboration capabilities. This gap also applied to accessing the right content experts.  Presto provides “People” as a searchable content type. Additional profile customization and personalization capabilities have been added to make finding subject matter experts easy.   Here is sample of the user interface.

To address this issue, Inmagic has built its information and expertise access capabilities to support specific business efforts such as proposal development or focused research efforts. To meet these needs Presto 3.3 is designed to better enable non-technical business users to create and manage Social Knowledge Networks. These networks can “span enterprise silos to merge relevant content, search, and community to address high-value business processes or topics.”  Here is an example eof their federated search.

They also recognized that SharePoint is becoming widely used in the enterprise collaboration space and have enhanced their SharePoint integration to bring their bidirectional query and access capabilities to this user group. These capabilities can be organized to address specific issues.  Below is a screen shot displaying the Sharepoint integration.

Phil gave a customer example. An online university has created a system to enable its professors to quickly build curriculum through content sharing.  This content sharing can be aggregated from multiple sources. You can bring content directly into Presto. You can access content across other enterprise repositories, or you can access related content on the Web. Users can create federated search adapters to access external content such as subscriptions, journals, and external research information.  The people who configure that system can target specific types of content, but then Presto takes over to automate much of the content acquisition process.

I asked Phil that since SharePoint developers say they can build almost anything with this tool, why not just use it instead of adding Presto.  He segmented SharePoint users into two groups to respond to the question. First, there are the low-end users who use SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities to proliferate sites, but these can quickly become more siloed than what they replaced. Presto can address this issue with minimum development expense to unlock the silos.

On the high end, many people start with SharePoint and create complex implementations that require a lot of systems integration time and costs. Presto can greatly shorten the effort here and reduce the amount of custom work that can be expensive to maintain over time. It is the classic “build versus buy” issue, and Presto is designed to bring down the total cost of ownership through the use of their existing capabilities.  You can get up and running quicker to realize the benefits of the implementation much faster.  This makes sense and I have used this approach to ROI many times in the past.

The capabilities of Presto takes much of the effort out of the IT developers hands and puts it into the control of content strategists.  This latter group needs to be involved anyway. However, they are sometimes neglected when there are heavy IT development requirements. I like their enhancements, as Presto 3.3 should bring the transparency benefits of Enterprise 2.0 to more people at a greater speed.