A Wiki for All Reasons

Just to keep you in the loop, this week we announced another new client. As always, I find it fascinating all the different types of enterprises and ventures with a wiki commonality.

This time, SamePage was selected by Growth Dynamics International (GDI) as the secure networking, collaboration and content-management platform for members of its online learning website, Lifelong Learning Community. Its global members will take online courses, complete private assignments, as well as shared work, and interact regularly with other members in groups and discussions.

It's kind of a self-help / motivational group with common goals and interests. Not an 'enterprise' group, by any means. Yet they should benefit tremendously from having a secure platform that allows them to share select information, collaboration worldwide and work together.

“We spent quite a bit of time researching potential solutions before we came upon SamePage and knew it was the perfect solution for our collaboration, security, information-sharing and content needs,” said Doug Fike, director of GDI, which founded L3Community.com. “Most CMS options didn’t allow for enough collaboration; more socially focused options didn’t have the structure and security we needed. SamePage offers the best combination for our virtual community, and it is easy to use for our non-technical members.”

Read more about SamePage document management and security features.

What do you use your wiki for?

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.

SamePage News

We are coming full force out of the summer (the fog and chill-filled summer in the Bay Area). I wanted to share some fun and recent news from SamePage.

First, Dan Gelinas of Security Systems News wrote an article about how our new customer, DICE Corp. is benefiting from SamePage and sharing key advantages with it's own customers. DICE develops large-scale software automation for the security and alarm industries and created DICEWise Wiki as a knowledge management tool. It deployed SamePage to tighten up operations, cut down on wasted paper and postage and deliver up-to-date efficiency to its central station clients while saving time and money.

Cliff Dice, president of DICE Corp. praised the leap forward SamePage provides.

“In the past we moved from having paper for manuals to digital copies on disc. Nowadays, with our software being cloud computing based—anybody can access it through a browser anywhere in the world—the need for training and documentation takes on a new dimension. With cloud-based computing environments, which are deployable anywhere, you have embedded documentation, which takes us to the wiki,” Dice said. “People think of documentation as a living, breathing thing now that they can modify and add to … You want your customers to be able to add to it … If you’re using my product now and you don’t know what a particular field is, you can go click on the arrow and it will deliver the webpage with the wiki embedded. And it builds in the whole knowledgebase.”

Read the rest of the DICE and SamePage article.

In other exciting news, SamePage was voted one of KMWorld's TrendSetting Products of 2010.

"We are pleased to add eTouch SamePage to our list of truly innovative products that are helping to drive the knowledge management market," said Hugh McKellar, editor of KMWORLD. "In our eighth year of awarding trend-setting products, our judging panel assessed even more products than previously. Each product selected demonstrated clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that serve the vendors' full spectrum of constituencies, especially their customers."

All this good news is helping put our team in high gear as we move into the busy Fall. Watch this space for more.

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