Tim Barker - Koral

Tim Barker - Koral
Hello, I'm Tim Barker, I'm the Co-founder and VP of Products at Koral and I'll give a quick demonstration of what Koral does. So, Koral is a new class of company that we think is a part of an emerging trend of Enterprise 2.0 companies; they're applying the principles of Web 2.0 to enterprise apps and enterprise problems. So, there's been a lot of talk and a lot of applications in the last 12-18 months that focus on consumer apps, to help consumers store, share and manage their documents. And we've now looked to how we can apply those same kinds of principles into a Web-Based Enterprise environment. So, let's start off for the demonstration of how we can apply content management principles to the masses. There is a large number of users, they have no system at all and we think there's something like Koral can fill the market gap.

So, let's start with how contribution and how document start, which is on the Desktop. So, the way that we work in Koral is to try make it blindingly easy to contribute content. So, what we have is a little Drop Box here, when I drop a file or a whole bunch of files onto the desktop or a drop box it will not load those in the backgrounds to the hosted Koral service and now it's done, you can see it pops up a little instant message telling me that it's been published. So, at this point that document is now been stored, indexed and is now searchable to all my colleagues in my workgroup. But, if I want it to, I can go and click on it and do some additional categorization. So, Koral's got rid of idea of using folders and the taxonomies to categorize and uses a tag-based approach, which is just a lot more scalable and a lot more friendly to end users. So, I can classify with tags that I've used before and also I could go and take some of the Suggested Tags that Koral has suggested, does this by walking through the text of his PowerPoint and looking for common phrases and terms, so I can go ahead, categorized that and press 'Save' when I'm done.

So, now let's login to the Web App and have a quick look to see how it looks from there. So, I go to the Koral site, go ahead and login, and when I do that, the way that we are organizing in Koral is around a dashboard, almost Netvibes type approach. So, as you login, you can see that there's Recent Activity that's been going on within my company and I can see things, other documents I have subscribed to will come onto that, and all the different types of content and workspaces I am a member of. So, as we have a tag cloud and this is the tag cloud that's personal to me based on the permissions I have to see all these documents, first thing would be if I'm looking for some information on the high-tech industry, click on the tag cloud and there's you'd expect it's going to go ahead and pull back all of the documents and in this case show me the most recent document first that matches that tag.

So, you can see here, we're using the tag metaphor to allow us to navigate around, so I can go and look for client-approved documents here by clicking on the tab or I can go and look for anything that Jon Levine has produced by clicking on his name. What we also do is to allow you to subscribe to certain things, so if I look at the documents Jon has produced and I think that they're valuable, I can go ahead and subscribe to Jon as an author, now what happens then any new documents to get uploaded into Koral will then be sent to me through an RSS feed or a nightly e-mail as a set of recommendations, a bit like the way that Amazon recommends content here. So, I can use this as a way to navigate around the set of information and if I go and probably do a search up here, let's do another search for, before looking for solution maps for different industries, quite often one of the problems that the companies have when they're using file-based content repositories is if I've done a search and I see a document that might be relevant, it might be a six meg PowerPoint.

So, one of the key things we've done is, make it really easy and light weight to access this content online. So, I go ahead and click on 'Preview' and now I can preview that whole presentation online. So, it does this by rendering all of these different file formats into Flash, which makes it really easy and quick and super-fast to download. So, maybe if that's a useful documents for me I might go ahead and subscribe to that as well meaning that, if that document ever changes Koral will tell me through an RSS feed or e-mail or we can also do is kind of take a bit deep browse, we can see here and expands and view more details about this document. So, the way that Koral work is obviously around versioning and managing all the different versions of this piece of content. So, I can see all of the different versions has been overtime and download and preview those. But also we trying to build a community around the content.

So, just as you would with a Wiki, you can have a discussion or comment threads about documents. So, one of our primary used cases for this is to support sales and marketing. So, if you imagine corporate marketing produce a whole set of class roll, pump it out to the sales teams, first thing you want to be able to do is get some feedback loop. So, sales people can write content, they can also add comments on it, and then also you can see how many people have clicked through and actually downloaded this content as well, who has downloaded the most recent version, who has downloaded older versions, and also who has subscribed to the content as well. So, which people think this content is valuable and are subscribing for updates on it. So, really we'll come back to -- but the very basics it have content and document repositories work, I'm just trying to make it blindingly simple for people to use them. But we're also integrating into the kinds of business applications that people use everyday.

So, if I've given a login to Salesforce, we've done a Mashup, an AppExchange integration with Salesforce that goes beyond just a single sign on to really embed some of Koral's functionality into the primary types of things that sales and service people do. So, here's an example, if we login and go and look at the opportunity, let's say that we're selling to Intel and we're selling against Seibel and Oracle as competitors and we have a product called Sales Intelligence that we are pushing out to them. Similar feedback that we found when we took this out in the Beta Program was that salespeople didn't want to go and search for things they wanted the content to find them. So, what we can do is we have added extra links inside the opportunities that when you click on it will go in and do a contextual search and it will show you the most recent and relevant documents that you should use in this opportunity.

So, it takes all the information about the customers, their name, the industry they are in, the competitors that you are competing with, and the products you are positioning, and gives you that contextual relevant search to take to the most up-to-date content that you need. And from within there you get all those same kinds of features for doing previews and looking at the details of their documents and the main thing that you do now is you probably go ahead and touch few of these back up to the opportunity for the rest of your team. So, this way we can then when we're working on opportunity we go back see all of the contents all of the documents you are going to use in campaign, share those with your colleague and also we track the content of where it's used. So, later on we can provide you with some analytics that show view, which are most used documents or presentation for different clients.

Now, the last issue that we've solve is one that really we see never seen anywhere else addressed, which is the challenge of how do you let content soak out of a repository on to a people desktops to still keep control of it. So, this is what, this is typical scenario, your sale guys going in, they've pulled on a price list they've pulled it on their desktop and they use that from that point on. So, Koral solved this problem by basically telling you if you are using an old versions of the documents. So, you can see it poked up an IM to tell me that the document I am looking at was updated two weeks ago and also I can do a quick click and to compare versions so what Koral will do now is pull that down from the Koral website and push that through a -- into Word and get a diff comparison. So, it will tell me that my pricing is outdated with two of the editions that I am selling. So, this means the content can flow out of this golden repository that we have but you can still get benefits of versioning. So, since we have launch Koral on the 25th of September we have been focusing on sales and marketing, through out the next 12 months we'll be really looking at an area such as professional services, integrating the sales force further, and really providing a full on demand software as a service for content and document management thanks very much for you time.