Koral - Enterprise2.0 Content Management

By Vivek Puri | October 2nd, 2006 at 01:17 pm ET         

Koral launched its business content management system focused at Small to Medium businesses at DEMOfall. Koral is one the first movers into Enterprise2.0 space and will offer storage, sharing, and sync facilities for business content. Koral has been developed by BuildOnline which develops On Demand document management and collaboration solutions and has offices in 7 countries. Koral is headed by Mark Suster and its development team is located in US and UK.

Koral has done a great job by giving a fresh outlook to enterprise CMS. They developed some really nice and much needed features that were not present in the Enterprise products like Documentum or FileNet. To start with, Koral does not have a folder based structure, which is instead replaced by a Tag based classification (yes, they have a tag cloud). When user uploads a file, the content is only visible to the user which can than be published to private areas called workspace. These workspaces can be accessed by groups of people who can than subscribe (via RSS/Email) to documents contained within. Users are alerted whenever any of their subscribed-to documents get updated. Users can also subscribe to topics or even authors to get updated whenever they publish/update a document. To promote interaction and feedback, Koral enables rating and commenting of workspace documents.

Off course Koral intelligently replaces the old version with the newer version while maintaining the document version history. Koral has also developed a document search which provides results based on relevance, popularity, and contribution dates. To save time on document downloads, users can pre-view Microsoft PowerPoint files online (Word and Excel support is coming). Koral has an intelligent feature where it notifies its users when they open a document on their laptop for which a newer version has been uploaded. Koral also makes PowerPoint updates easier. If users update a slide of a PowerPoint presentation, Koral can tell which presentations have a copy of the slide so that the all files can be updated at the same time.

It took 18 months for the Koral team to develop this application. In my talk with Mark Suster he mentioned that his team of 8 people spent lot time figuring out the right mix of technologies to provide a scalable and secure application. Currently, Koral is ready with its Salesforce integration, and is also working on integrating with Amazon S3 and Google Base for required modules. Koral will also provide a desktop monitor so that users can be notified about newer versions of their subscribed documents. Desktop client will also provide drag-drop interface and tagging of file uploads.

Personally I was never a big fan of Enterprise CMS which are no more than behemoth file stores with an even bigger price and maintenance tag. Koral does make document sharing easier with its subscription model. Also Koral is a hosted service so you don’t really need to worry about installation and maintenance. Pricing is very aggressive which will cost nothing for individual users, but if the companies want to lock down environment there will be a charge of $9/month/user to $60/month/user depending on the options they choose(like Document Workflow, Salesforce integration). Still, Koral is paradigm shifts of sorts in Enterprise CMS that has seen some consolidation lately.

Links:
Koral
BuildOnline

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