Inmagic Presto 3.0 Adds Social Components to Knowledge Management Platform
by Bill Ives
Unlike many players in the Enterprise 2.0 market, Inmagic began in 1983 in the Boston area by providing what became to be called knowledge management solutions. Their first market was the corporate library function. Many companies would purchase data from outside sources and the corporate librarian had to manage this unstructured data and make it accessible.
I spoke with Phil Green, the current Inmagic CTO, and Mike Cassettari, the VP of Marketing. With most of the traditional database tools available in the 80s, you had to make the data fit the structure of the data fields. Inmagic offered fields of unlimited length so you could make the database structure fit the nature of the content. They were one of the pioneers in handling unstructured data. They added the ability to handle imaging in the early 90s.
Then in 1996 Inmagic began offering web publishing tools and Web 1.0 applications. went with Web services at the front end level. As Phil and Mike said, their path reflects the ongoing changes in the industry. Some of their clients wanted a Web version to share data across locations. These clients and others discovered that this led to far greater data sharing on a global basis than anticipated. I also experienced this in several firms.
Next, Inmagic moved to a complete Web version with a .Net solution. They now provide both a hosted offering and an on-premise solution. Mike and Phil said it is about 50-50 in terms of client preferences. If the client is a business user and does not want to get IT involved, they often pick the SaaS version. If the client is within IT and/or concerned with security, they often pick the on-premise offering.
All this brings us up to the present and the advent of Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. Inmagic now has two product offerings. Their legacy Inmagic DB/Text still serves a large number of corporate clients in the library space. They now also offer Inmagic® Presto as a Web 2.0 offering. They recently announced Presto 3.0 that includes a number of features to make knowledge management more social. Below is a sample home page of a knowledge sharing system based on Presto.
Mike very rightly pointed out how the introduction of social media into the enterprise can add to the information silos. I have seen this before and agree. Presto provides access to a broad array of unstructured content within the enterprise to overcome these silos. It provides this access in a way that maintains the unique aspects of each data type (e.g. images, text multimedia). There is both a quick one field search and advanced search through categories. You can create virtual folders so items can be indexed in multiple ways.
Presto can also be employed in a Sharepoint environment. This enables firms to reduce the amount of costly and time consuming Sharepoint customization to get the capabilities that Presto brings out of the box. Here you can see Presto search results that bring forward to nature of each file type.
The four main social aspects that have been added with Presto 3.0 are the ability to tag, rate, and comment on content, as well as the abilty to Blog. There is also role-based access to these capabilities and the other features Presto offers. An administrator can decide who has the ability to place tags, as well as rate and comment on content, and they also have the ability to permission who can Blog. Below you can see the role-based options open to the administrator.
It is nice to see a long term player continue to evolve with the market and do well. Mike said that their performance continues strong in the down economy. He attributes this to three factors: their large client base and long standing clients, the appeal of the Web 2.0 features in Presto, and their focus on departmental solution with low cost points of entry.
