Guest: Puneet Gupta - ConnectBeam

Puneet Gupta - ConnectBeam
Hi, I'm Puneet Gupta. I'm the co-founder and CEO of ConnectBeam, and we'll go through a quick demonstration of ConnectBeam application. The idea behind ConnectBeam is really helping enterprise users tap into the collective knowledge of their co-workers. So, think of it this way taking the concepts of social bookmarking and social networking, bringing that into the enterprise but with enterprise specific workflows, security settings, rules and relationships and things of that nature.

So, let's login to ConnectBeam, what we are doing here is we're going to go into connectbeam.com Website and login as a user. Much like something like Salesforce.com, what happens is when you set up with ConnectBeam, we carve out a separate space for your company domain inside ConnectBeam. So, we are one of the users and when you first login to ConnectBeam, you'll see information is basically grouped under two key areas; 'My Workspace' and 'Colleague's Workspace.' So, under 'My Workspace' you have topics and topics are like folders but these are 'Web 2.0' type folders meaning each topic has a social network or social Collaborative Framework around it.

What we're looking at here is all of these users; SalesRep One users different topics, and topics like you say could be really anything; accounts you're working on, products you're working on, your personal space, information you're gathering on a daily basis so topics could be really anything. And we're looking at here several of his topics and then this is the dashboard telling you inside each topic what we have. So, each topic can have bookmarks. So there's one called Brocade; the topic name and there are 17 bookmarks, there's three documents inside that topic and then this topic is shared with six subscribers.

If I go ahead and click on to the 'Topic,' it will take you inside the topic where you can see the different bookmarks or the documents and the subscribers can start to collaborate by entering comments or contributing to bookmarks and documents inside the topic. This is where the Collaborative Framework comes in, I can go ahead and invite somebody else into this topic, and the way that framework works is when you type in their e-mail address, they'll get an invitation. And in their e-mail when they click on that link and then they sign up with ConnectBeam, the topic that you're sharing with them will automatically appear in their Colleague's Workspace. And at that point you can see what they're doing with it, at any given time you can see who are the different subscribers and what kind of activity there is with respect to those subscribers.

So, that's the concept of topics and when you go ahead and create a topic you can specify whether this topic is just for you or it's a company wide topic, and then you can selectively bring in other users into their shared network. So, let's go ahead and actually go through an example of bringing let's say, a bookmark into a topic. You go to a different Web page, it could be any Web page Intranet or Extranet, let's say if this was one of the Web page you wanted to bookmark, there's a bookmark plate on the top of your tool bar; be at Internet Explorer, Firefox it work with either one. It'll pop up this nice 'Save to ConnectBeam' a dialogue box and you simply select the topic you want to save the bookmark into. And I'll give you some Suggested Tags, you can pick any tags, you can enter your own tags, you click on 'Save' it goes away and the information is now saved.

The process of the act of doing that actually has bubbled this information to the tops. If you click on Recent Activity, you'll see that I've just saved one item into Brocade and what that item maybe. Similarly, you can go across all of your different topics or all the topics across the company or your Colleague's Workspace. If you were absent or you were on vacation for few days, you can simply pick a date and go back in time to see what was the activity across the company or across your Workspace for that date. And of course, as you're doing all of that, it's building the Tag Cloud for you, so this is your tag cloud and again you can click on anyone of these links to find the matches against that tag, and there is also the Company Tag cloud that it's building based on activity of other users.

Let's come on in and actually do a search. So, let's say, if I wanted to find some information related to IBM inside my organization, maybe I was working on a deal and I'm looking for some competitive info on IBM, what I've just done is typed 'IBM' and searched for that and it's found 18 results, and these are all the results that it has found, but interestingly, it's also showing me related tags and related users, and this is where it gets really interesting, so, I look at related users and I see, 'Oh! There is a person called Julie Foltz, and she might have something to do with IBM.'

So, I'm going to click on that, and now what we're going to see is a detailed profile of Julie Foltz inside my organization. So, not only am I seeing her contact information, but I'm really seeing what we call her areas of skills and expertise or what she really is all about inside the company and this is, in the middle is her tag cloud so we can see it's heavily weighted towards IBM, so she might be keeping information related to IBM and these are some of the topics that she has shared with the company. And, if I was interested in any one of these topics, I could simply click on it and I could see what there is and I could bring that into my Collaborative Framework by clicking on 'Add this topic to my Colleague's Workspace.'

So, that sort of at a high-level -- the features of ConnectBeam. Let me just take a quick minute and show you another feature; an extension of ConnectBeam that we have just announced in the market, which is basically integrating this entire framework into your Enterprise Intranet and particularly Enterprise Search. So, most of the companies already have some kind of Enterprise Search. If I were to do this inside a company that deploys ConnectBeam, particularly if they've already got let's say, Google's Enterprise Search Box, what you're seeing here is the combination of ConnectBeam and Google's Enterprise Search. So, what we have done is overlade all the features that I've just shown you in ConnectBeam onto the Enterprise Search.

So, look here, I've just done the same search and I've got the related tags and I've got the related users just like what we saw earlier, and interestingly enough the first set of results are then results that are coming out of the information that other users inside my company have already tagged or bookmarked. So, you'll see that one user has saved this link or two users have saved this link and against each link there's this nice little link called 'Save to My Workspace' and if this was of interest to you, you could simply click on that and then you can bring that into your Collaborative Framework inside ConnectBeam.

So, this has been the key feature where you can imagine how easy it would become to get your users on to a Web 2.0 Framework by integrating this into your Intranet Search. So, that's a high level demo of ConnectBeam. Please contact us at ConnectBeam if you have any questions and we thank you for your time.