Erin Moloney (@ErinE) put me onto this techcrunch article about Openera. In a nutshell, Openera hooks up to a wide range of email accounts like gmail, Exchange, and any IMAP standard server to automate taking your attachments in email and putting them in Google Apps, iCloud, Box, Dropbox, etc. What’s cool about that you say? Well, having implemented collaboration tools a couple times, I can say that half the battle is in getting users to actually push content into the tool so others can collaboration around it. Anything that makes it easier to get content into your sharing tool has to show some promise.
Openera’s claim to fame lies not only in it’s unique intermediary approach but in the automation of moving documents to specific locations based on a variety of user defined rules. That’s the really cool part. It’s fire and forget.
Lalonde says he was inspired to start Openera based on his own experience at OpenText. “I realized that our main competitor wasn’t Documentum, IBM or Microsoft,” he says, “it was the users, and users not putting files where they should be. Our users wouldn’t adopt, and if they wouldn’t adopt the project would typically fail,” he adds. “Content management relies on people putting the content into the content management system.”
The system users actually seemed to prefer using, of course, is email. “People tend to follow the path of least resistance, and they resist change. So what if rather than changing user behavior, we could extract value from it?” he thought to himself. “I looked at existing user behavior, and existing user behavior is email.”
The problem with content management systems today is that it’s the company that cares where the files are, not the users. They’re not motivated to move them to the right repositories when they know how to find them in their inbox. But the larger a company grows, the more pressing the need is to locate and organize corporate documents – especially for compliance purposes
Openera Dashboard
Go to the original article for the complete and far longer story plus more screenshots.
