Joint Contact: Easy Knowledge Management

Features:

• Joint Contact can be used as an information portal for internal team members or for business-to-business communications
  
  
• Joint Contact tracks information about people as well as projects
  
  
• Joint Contact supports XML web services and can be customized to integrate with existing websites, intranets, Microsoft Office 2007, or other important business applications
  

real-world business example:

Karen owns a small company which specializes in brokering car insurance benefits. Karen and her 6 person team work hard to keep organized, but they have a tough time managing document revisions between the company and their customers.

For each client served, Karen's business may receive several quotes from different insurance carriers. Once the information is organized into a proposal, the document may be revised several times by the customer. Karen currently has 65 customers (of various sizes) and her company has had to hire extra staff to manage client requests for proposal revisions and other project related tasks. Currently each proposal revision is emailed as a PDF document.

Karen has no offsite workers, but occasionally works from home on various high priority items. These files are usually kept private and are saved to an external hard-drive. These files are saved back to the network when she returns to the office.

Karen's Proposed Solution

• Store documents on a local file server and email document revisions to customers as attachments
  
  
• Establish a Virtual Private Network connection to the office so that Karen can work on exclusive files from a remote location
  
  

Karen's Challenges

• Document management solutions exist, but are generally designed to work for colleagues working at the same company.  She is looking for a solution her company can provide to other customers.

• Her team spends too much time writing and forwarding emails.
  
  
• Email is used as the company document management tool instead of a notification tool.  Since documents are stored in individual email accounts, co-workers are unable to locate documents and other items quickly.
  
  
• Cost of ownership. Karen has seen other information portal solutions, but they are either open source, or require extensive configuration that goes beyond the technical expertise of her team. Ideally she would like to find a solution that can be configured quickly, has the ability to be accessed by her customers, and won't cost her a fortune to maintain.
  

Joint Contact: Easy Knowledge Management

Karen decides that there must be a better way to synchronize the information flow between her growing client base and her team. After viewing the online demonstration, Karen signs up for a free account at www.jointcontact.com.

• Karen creates accounts for all clients who will access the system.
  
  
• Karen defines project workspaces for each company that will use Joint Contact. As part of each workspace, she defines which accounts should be associated to which workspace.
  
  
• Karen creates a special private workspace for her private files. She is the only person assigned to this workspace.
  
  
• When Karen's clients log into Joint Contact, they only see the workspaces assigned to them. Clients add documents, project requests and important information on their own without the direct aid of Karen's staff (or email attachments). Karen's staff is automatically notified by email when a client modifies a document or any other content item.
  
  
• When Karen logs in, she is able to see all her client workspaces in addition to the private workspace she configured. She is now able to add and update documents in her private workspace from home without the use of a VPN connection or an external hard drive.
  
  
• Since Karen is using the hosted version of Joint Contact, she has no additional costs for hardware or software.   Karen also did not have to hire an IT manager or external consultant to help her implement the solution