Content Migration's a Snap

A couple of months ago, I spoke with a reporter from EContent Magazine about content migration. She was interested in learning about the process, however difficult or easy it may be, of moving content into a new and better software product. [The article is slated for the March issue, and I'll post it when it's live.] Of course, she didn't only want to hear from me about how great SamePage enterprise wiki features are, so we got in touch with a customer.

I put her in touch with Dave Collins, the founder of Penchant Software, which is now a division of 3PD, the nation's largest direct-to-home delivery company. I hadn't previously heard much detail about Dave's experiences with SamePage. I was thrilled when he raved about his migration to our enterprise wiki software, made easy with our Universal Import Tool. Dave had so much valuable insight into the process that we decided to interview him more and put together a case study about his process and experiences.


You can download the case study PDF from http://etouch.net/customers/testimonial.html.

Dave transitioned his massive HELP desk documents into SamePage a few years ago after learning about wikis in an MBA program. (Hooray for Web 2.0-savvy university professors!) His biggest concerns with a migration were that he couldn't have a lot of down time, and he couldn't lose ANY documentation, videos, hyperlinks or anything else. With the use of our tool, he didn't.

“I had no idea how fast it would be, but it was great,” recalls Collins. “With the next release, we modified our help URL to go directly to the wiki, and that was it. Being so easy – that’s what you always hope for.”

SamePage immediately made Dave's life easier.

“SamePage removed all of our choke points…. It’s a million times better process for managing and updating content," explains Collins. The sky's the limit. SamePage is an easy way to quickly organize a large amount of content. It doesn't need much training...”

Read more about Penchant's easy migration to SamePage.

Anonymous, But No Less Important

It seems I have been remiss about blogging recently. It’s not that it hasn’t been on my mind; it’s that I’ve been very busy, which is a very, very good thing.

I am proud to report that after setting a personal goal to get more customer feedback in 2010, I have accomplished it. We’ve just completed a customer case study with a US-based, publicly traded global brokerage and financial markets technology company that has been a SamePage customer since 2007.

It’s anonymous. That is, we can’t attach a company name to it. Unfortunately, that’s a common story in the world of software vendors. Customers may be pleased as punch with your solution. But if they publicly comment on that, they’ll have every vendor knocking down their door. So the high-profile customers often have no-comment policies.

So, we agreed to settle on an anonymous case study. And when we heard about how useful SamePage has been to this company, we’re thrilled we did. Because even though none of you know which company it is, we do. And there’s tremendous satisfaction knowing that this large, successful corporation is so happy with our solution. We’re busting at the seams to let you in on our little secret. But alas, we can’t.

The company’s manager of global development infrastructure proclaims that many people use the wiki every day and it is “extremely key to almost all of our development projects. We use it for collaboration on a daily basis.”

“We have lots of separate projects,” the manager added. “So we need what we think of as separate wikis. We have about 145 project wikis – not all of them are active, but they are so easy to create. SamePage really understood that need and offers great separation of projects. In our development process, project ‘owners’ set up wikis for individual projects or products.”

“We’d be lost without it,” he said.

Will you take a few minutes to read the case study? Read the rest: SamePage Financial-Technology Customer Case Study

New Year, Old Thank Yous

We've hit the ground running in 2010. There's good energy, excitement...a buzz in the air.

I always become reflective when we turn the page in the calendar to a new year. The other day, I started thinking about SamePage customers and how I always like to hear about how and why they're using our software. I want to know all about what their teams are able to accomplish with their online collaboration and knowledge management. It's not everyday that I hear about how our customers are using the enterprise wiki and what kind of specific successes they are having. But some SamePage customers have provided feedback to us in the past, including these below, and I thank them for it. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

"SamePage allows us to securely and efficiently share and discuss project information with our collaborators located across the US."

- Stan Burgos, Graduate Researcher, Caltech

"I can't imagine we could have made a better choice. This one did not take us a lot of effort to start up and work with. It's very well done; and works very well for us. We didn't do any training, but everybody can jump in and use the product with zero start-up time. It's that intuitive."

- Kevin Morningstar, Executive Director, SAITS, Cal Poly Pomona
Read a full case study about Cal Poly Pomona.

"We have been looking for an enterprise solution in the market to fulfill the collaboration requirements of our customer. SamePage met the criterion set by our client, i.e. to allow users gain access to information, resources, and enable them to collaborate, generate and share ideas and knowledge. SamePage's ease-of-use, intuitive interface and the WYSIWYG editing feature for the blog and wiki enabled user collaboration and ensured perpetual retention and extension of knowledge and experiences within the client's organization. The robust solution also allowed ease of deployment in a complex and high availability clustered infrastructure. Our working relationship with eTouch has been very good and the technical support is responsive and helpful in our journey in deploying SamePage for our client."

-Pee Yee Koo, Project Manager, Siemens

A Success Story at Cal Poly Pomona

“With Word, the documents were not very searchable, and we had limited ability to share these documents at the same time. We tried to use a CMS system to create internal web pages, but it wasn’t set up to manage dynamic pages with multiple contributors at multiple times. It was unwieldy and simply not friendly for collaboration.”

This is a direct quote from a wiki user and probably has more weight than when I toot my company's horn about strengths of wikis over word and CMS systems.

I promise I didn’t make it up. Kevin Morningstar, executive director of Student Affairs Information & Technology Services (SAITS) within the Division of Student Affairs at California State Polytechnic University Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), said it.

There’s a new case study on the SAITS experiences and successes to-date with SamePage. In it, Kevin explains how, for the first few years of its operation, SAITS was charged with (and employees struggled with) finding ways to create and share effective user and technical documentation. They tried and discarded other solutions before determining a wiki was the best fit.

Kevin explains that when his team found SamePage: “We jumped on it. SamePage came pre-packaged; it was already executable to be immediately up and running,” he noted. “And we had it up and running in 24 hours with one staff member taking care of the set up.”

“I can’t imagine we could have made a better choice,” he said. Read the rest of the case study.