I read today that although the wording of the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4th, 1776 it was probably only signed on August 2nd (this is the subject of a lot of scholarly debate, but I digress). This little delay makes the timing of today's update of KnowledgeTree serendipitous - we can share this great date with a little Declaration of Independence of our own...

Through integration with the Zoho collaboration and productivity suite, KnowledgeTree users can now create, share and edit cloud content in a multitude of file formats online. Rather than creating documents locally and then uploading them for collaboration, documents can now be “born in the cloud”.

In addition to common Microsoft Office document (.doc) and spreadsheet (.xls) file formats, you can create and edit rich text (.rtf) and text (.txt) files. Prefer the OpenOffice file formats? No problem, these are supported too. As a KnowledgeTree user, you can declare your independence from desktop software by using the Zoho integration for your document collaboration needs.

In addition to enhanced collaboration functionality, this release of KnowledgeTree also sports a completely new Browse Documents view. We know that your highest priority is to access your content, but that your next priority is to work with your content as quickly and easily as possible. The new Browse documents view not only provides improved performance in an attractive and modernized interface, it lets you interact contextually with your content.

Now, you can download, check-in / check-out, email and set document alerts right from the browse document view (whereas before you had to drill down into the details page to perform document actions).

Thumbnails are displayed when you mouse over a document, and icons with tips on mouse over indicate document states (such as checked out or finalized). Multi-file and folder actions can still be performed on this page using the file or folder check boxes for selection. This is just the first phase of some major improvements in how these critical actions are presented in KnowledgeTree... watch this space.

No matter the date, you can declare your independence from the tyranny of managing your documents via email or shared drives. KnowledgeTree coupled with Zoho will put you on the road to liberation.

According to the latest numbers by IDC, we may be seeing traditional licensed software wheezing its way to its ultimate demise.

IDC’s report states “that by 2012, almost 85 percent of new vendors will be focused on SaaS services…and some two-thirds of new offerings from established vendors will be sold as SaaS”

Further, IDC predicts that “SaaS revenue numbers will jump up accordingly in the next few years, rising from US$13.1 billion in 2009 to $40.5 billion by 2014…while license revenues for traditional on-premises applications will drop roughly $7 billion this year and are likely in permanent decline.”
Frankly, this comes as no surprise.

The relatively recent recognition by software companies that the small and medium business segment is a growth area, coupled with reliable and ubiquitous broadband has made offering cloud-based applications a smart business move.

According to the US Small Business Administration, businesses with fewer than 500 workers account for half of the nation’s private, nonfarm real gross domestic product and half of all Americans who work in the private sector are employed by a small firm.

While these companies have many of the same software needs as larger enterprises, they lack the money and in-house resources to install, maintain and administer the associated hardware and applications. Consequently, they’ve been largely ignored by the enterprise software companies who traditionally made their money on upfront license fees and hefty annual maintenance contracts.

Last Friday (July 9) we released several great new features on our SaaS platform. This is the first update since KnowledgeTree’s fresh new interface was made available to users of our 30-day free trial. The focus of this update was on usability and we’re sure you’ll be as excited about some of the changes as we are!

New users will notice the “Getting Started” dialog that loads the first time you access KnowledgeTree and presents how-to videos. Not only will this help trial users get the most out of their trial, but it’s a great refresher for everyone else too. The Getting Started videos complement the comprehensive help and support provided through the Get Help link where you can find the answers to more in-depth questions, log issues and make suggestions for product enhancements — all through one easy to use interface.

Continuing with our theme of simplifying document management, KnowledgeTree provides lightweight contracts management features, called Document Alerts. The video below illustrates how Document Alerts can be used to manage the lifecycle of documents, alerting a user, or group of users, when a document reaches a certain age.

Document Alerts can also be created for classes of documents, ensuring that lifecycle rules are applied uniformly across your content.

More examples of how you can solve your document process challenges with KnowledgeTree are available in our solutions directory.

Earlier this week I blogged about new features we're rolling out to users over the next few weeks, one of which is Salesforce.com integration. We've put together a video below that shows off this new functionality.

More information on how KnowledgeTree can assist sales and marketing teams is available in our solutions directory.

I can’t help but feel incredibly excited about KnowledgeTree’s announcement today about the launch of our enhanced SaaS offering. Our entire company put a tremendous amount of effort toward making KnowledgeTree the SaaS application of choice for organizations that want to go beyond simple online file sharing and embrace document process management.

Most documents need to have something done with them or to them – they don’t just exist to get stored somewhere. Many documents need a series of things done to them, such as approvals, notifications, and routing.

This is where KnowledgeTree goes beyond basic document storage with features like our new drag and drop visual workflow designer. It lets users easily create workflows that contain common actions, such as email, request approval, notify a user – all from an intuitive design palette of options.  

We've just experienced a temporary outage on the KnowledgeTree.com domain. Our DNS service providers have worked to resolve the issue and we are now back online for all websites and email services.

This outage will not have affected customers using KnowledgeTree's KnowledgeTreeLive cloud offering.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Recently, the folks over at KTPlugins.com released the KTPlugins Plugin Framework, a new plugin that enhances the existing plugin framework. While this plugin does not add additional functionality,  it offers developers tools to build better and more advanced plugins for KnowledgeTree.

The plugin already sports a nifty feature called Advanced Triggers,  which allows developers to intercept execution and processing before the page is rendered. Another feature being planned is automated checking for new versions of existing plugins based on the framework. 

Excited to learn more, I asked Aart-Jan Boor of the KTPlugins team,  a few questions about this project and how this will be of value to developers and in turn, benefit the KnowledgeTree community.

DW: Why the need for a new framework?
AB: The KT Plugin Framework is pretty nice. I think its best features are that it enables developers to build plugins without modifying any KnowledgeTree source code and that it has some very accessible APIs to develop standard plugins like dashlets, pages, folder/document actions etc. When building more advanced plugins though, we wanted to make more precise modifications to the interface and some KnowledgeTree functionality. The current framework doesn't offer this kind of advanced functionality, like adding additional information to the document details page, for example.

CRMAcceleration event
I had the privilege of speaking at a CRMAcceleration event hosted by The Sugar Refinery in London last Thursday (13th May). It was a great event and very well organized. I was impressed with how accessible and engaged the SugarCRM execs are with their customers and market.

Apart from taking the opportunity to poke fun at the enigmatic world of British politics, the topic of my talk was "Accelerating Sales Velocity with an Integrated CRM-DMS Solution". I looked at how integrating SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree through a module called iNetDocs (written by a KnowledgeTree partner in Paris – iNet Process) can empower sales agents by ensuring they have the right information when they needed it in the sales cycle. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today - if you want to hear a webcast of a similar talk you can download it here: SugarCRM-KnowledgeTree WebCast,  and you can get the community edition of the integration module here: iNetDocs 

The 70% club
What I want to talk about today is the 70% club. Several speakers from SugarCRM and other independent CRM practitioners mentioned this infamous club that you really, really don't want to join. Apparently 70% of CRM implementations across all vendors fail. There are many reasons for this, and one of the leading reasons highlighted was “lack of clear business goals”. In essence you really need to know what you want to achieve before you have a fighting chance of having a successful CRM implementation. One of the speakers showed a slide of actual customer quotes along the lines of: “We need a CRM system by next week. Can you help?”. Of course just installing some software because you have it probably won’t achieve anything more than taking up some disk space and providing a few hours of amusement.

In October 2009, KnowledgeTree launched a green IT promotion in conjunction with Food & Trees for Africa, a South African social enterprise that addresses climate change action and sustainable development through greening and permaculture food gardening. For every new commercial sale over $4500, as well as for every 1000th registered community installation during the promotional period, we promised to plant a tree in a disadvantaged African community. Why did we do this? Because:

• Even though KnowledgeTree helps customers reduce paper waste through electronic document management, we wanted to do more.
• Not only do trees help the planet by improving air quality, they also cheer and beautify neighborhoods, bring people together and provide hope for the future.

When the promotional period came to an end in April, KnowledgeTree donated all the trees derived from the campaign to an underprivileged school in Sea-Winds, Cape Town.