Los Altos, Calif.’s Inclusion Inc., one of the many firms that bill
themselves as knowledge sharing or management enablers (a la IntraNet
Solutions and Plumtree) Thursday scored a coup when it hooked Sun
Microsystems Inc. to buy its intranet communications solution.
The self-titled software was designed to help workers collaborate and
communicate more effectively; Sun said it plans to use Inclusion to improve
the mechanics of its Global Sales Organization (GSO) sales staff and field
engineers.
Inclusion’s solution provides GSO with threaded message exchange within an
SSL-encrypted environment, which yields fast turn-around of edits or
improvements to presentations. Inclusion facilitates direct communications
across organizational and geographic boundaries, regardless of IT
infrastructures, operating systems or desktop applications.
It’s about keeping workers on the same page, really — especially in
corporate environments where offices are scattered near and far in a
particular country. With collaboration apps, management gains direct
oversight of dispersed projects and the enterprise preserves the
intellectual property created in the process, which in turn leads to a
better run organization.
And strictly from a business sense, the across-the-board access that
Inclusion will provide Sun can help the hardware titan
cut the costs associated with maintaining the most recent document versions.
Despite repetitive doomsday economy reports, knowledge management solutions
are gaining momentum for a simple reason: information explosion. This is
particularly prevalent among corporate offices with the deluges of e-mail
that have prompted some companies to host “e-mail free” Fridays to give
employees a chance to catch up to the massive e-mail volumes across the
network.
In addition to severely hampering productivity, the e-mail glut stresses
systems administrators because they are the ones clearing out the company’s
inundated e-mail servers. It is Inclusion’s contention that extranets bring
vital information together so that businesses can get products to market
faster, reduce production costs, enhance customer relationships and
streamline business processes.
For Sun, the pros are legion because it is a company with several thousand
employees depending on one another to put out important products, such as
much sought after servers.
Inclusion’s software suite integrates the features of an e-mail list server,
document publishing service, Web-based workflow and threaded discussion
board into a single service. Inclusion solutions require no software to
download and use existing desktop applications, so employees are not
required to alter their work routines.
Inclusion’s Internet based software
is delivered either as an ASP or as software licenses. Professional services
are also provided.
