Interwoven , the enterprise content management (ECM)
vendor known more for its Web-based TeamSite offering, is now going after
company intranets, officials announced Monday.
In order to woo customers, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company has infused its new
intranet deal with simplicity, knowing enterprise
workers and IT staff have other things to worry about than learning a new
product.
Their answer to content management simplicity on the intranet is to provide
a repackaged version of its TeamSite 6.5 software suite, which focuses on
intranet content management and publishing.
“There is always that bias that people don’t want to learn new systems, but
Interwoven has invested heavily in making it a very intuitive user
experience in order to address those issues of business user adoption,” said
Anne Curran, Interwoven Web content management (WCM) senior marketing
manager. “The more simple, the more intuitive that we can make the user
experience, then the more likely people are to adopt.”
TeamSite 6.5, announced earlier
this month, allows for keyword searches based on content category, metadata
and file properties, as well as virtual grouping of documents — Interwoven content or a
competitor’s — across departmental content management applications.
Rather than a complex application interface, employees can drag and drop new
or updated documents into a folder, called the Interwoven ContentCenter
briefcase, which launches a distribution wizard.
Key features of the company’s intranet offering include:
- Content migration — drag-and-drop ability to import documents from
other content management applications into TeamSite; - Whole-site versioning — site snapshots for compliance requirements and
version control; - Forms-based contribution — using Interwoven’s FormsPublisher, users can
publish content using a fill-in-the-blank form.
Curran said that despite the perception that large corporate networks have
an overall IT policy in place to minimize the spread of disparate content
management applications, more and more companies are coming to Interwoven to
find a solution that bridges the sprawl of applications on the enterprise.
“What’s been happening is individual business units or departments have gone
out and acquired a kind of low-end departmental solution,” she said. “They
crop up all over the place, and then all of a sudden, IT is dealing with
systems in different departments with different standards and they have to
support all of them.”
TeamSite simplifies management for IT, too. With many companies
employing multiple intranets, whether separated by department or geography,
managing them can become tricky. Using what Curran calls a branching
architecture, IT and line-of-unit managers can manage all of them through
one interface.
Also, the migration from disparate content management applications onto one
platform — namely Interwoven’s — reduces the number of servers supporting
those applications in the network, as well as reduces support and licensing
costs.
Cost of the intranet software, available Monday, starts at $49,000 for one
server per 100 users.
