One sentence summary
Angel.com required an easy-to-use wiki solution with enterprise-class features delivered as a secure, reliable hosted service; Socialtext provided a robust wiki platform for collaboration between Angel.com’s employees, with its business partners, and as the foundation for its public community.
Company information
Angel.com, a subsidiary of MicroStrategy (NASD: MSTR), is a leading provider of on-demand Integrated Voice Response (IVR) and call center solutions. Founded in 1999, Angel.com has provided over 10,000 telephony solutions to more than 1600 customers, including Borland, Raytheon, Jiffy Lube, Kellogg’s and Reebok. Angel.com applications are built, deployed and managed entirely through a web browser, requiring no additional investment in hardware, software or human resources. And because Angel.com applications require no additional resources, the solutions are deployed quickly, usually in just days, so customers can more quickly benefit from a return on investment and improved customer support.
Link to Angel.com website - http://www.angel.com/
Link to Angel.com public IVR wiki - http://www.socialtext.net/ivrwiki/
Case description
Like many technology companies, Angel.com’s team had some existing experience with wikis before they considered a commercial solution. Primarily for project management tasks, Angel.com initially used an early open-source package called Quicki. Prior to IT formally selecting a wiki solution, various other open-source wikis were deployed within Angel.com and used by product management and engineering to communicate and collaborate in various ways. For example, product management would use the wiki to capture product requirements, specifications and document use-cases, while engineering would use the wiki to track development progress, schedules and technical documentation. As the open-source wiki deployment grew inside of Angel.com, feature limitations quickly became an increasing concern. Some key missing features included the lack of version control and the ability to track edits and revisions to wiki pages, no support for attachments to get added to wiki pages, and limited access control over who could view and edit wiki content. The frustration around feature gaps was further compounded by the fact that an increasing number of non-technical users, like marketing, sales and executive management wanted to use the wiki, but found themselves challenged by the daunting user experience and complicated wiki markup language.
Enterprise 2.0 solution
Based on Angel.com’s history and model of delivering software-as-a-service for their core business, it was only natural that as they considered wiki solutions for greater functionality, they consider a hosted wiki service. In 2004, Angel.com signed up for Socialtext’s hosted wiki service and almost immediately the user satisfaction and adoption increased. Not only did Socialtext’s enterprise-class features address the core functionality requirements, but it also provided an easy-to-use, web-based solution that was reliable. Over time, Angel.com quickly saw the adoption of the wiki spread from the early adopters in product management and engineering to include operations, marketing, sales, professional services and even technical documentation staff. Operations staff for example learned to use the wiki for communicating service upgrades and scheduled. Marketing and sales staff used the wiki to create a knowledgebase of competitive information and market research, and an online collateral library consisting of whitepapers, datasheets, presentations and training materials. And technical documentation staff used the wiki to collaborate on document creation and editing.
Compared to the traditional tools that Angel.com used, like their corporate intranet or email for sharing information, the wiki provided a more efficient way to collect valuable information together in one central location. The wiki also provided more instant access to relevant content using search and tagging features, as well as the ability for users to collaborate and incorporate real-time, dynamic updates to content quickly and easily.
As Angel.com’s adoption of the wiki continued to grow internally, they soon realized that by extending the wiki to their customers and business partners they could realize similar collaborative benefits for reducing email traffic and increasing group participation. In late 2006, Angel.com launched their public IVR Wiki, which was geared to their customer and partner audience. The IVR Wiki site provides resources and additional information for individuals interested in discussing the topic of IVR, as well as updates from Angel.com on corporate news, product releases and development related topics. One interesting thing that Angel.com decided to do was employ the Socialtext wiki for opening up their technical documentation, so anyone visiting the IVR Wiki could read the documentation online, but also anyone could make contributions and enhance the documentation. Already, Angel.com has seen some involvement from their customers and the community-at-large for contributing to the wiki, whether it be edits to the technical documents or the addition of best practices documents or specific customer use-case examples.
In addition to the public IVR Wiki, Angel.com has also started deploying wikis for strategic partner discussions. By using the authentication capabilities provided within the Socialtext wiki, this allows Angel.com staff to invite key partners into a wiki workspace where they can securely communicate and collaborate with one another and create a centralized, shared repository of information assets. Increasingly, Angel.com is finding the wiki to replace the old model of emails being sent back and forth between the corporate staff and its partners, and in turn finding that decisions can be made more quickly and collaboration can happen more seamlessly by using the wiki.
Results / Benefits
One of the key reasons the Socialtext hosted service was selected by Angel.com was based on its reliability balanced with its rich feature set. Based on assessments that Angel.com did of various wiki alternatives available in the marketplace, Socialtext had a reputation for delivering a reliable product, with no bugs or software glitches. Socialtext also offered the right features that Angel.com required and were unavailable with open-source solutions. For example, Socialtext provided Angel.com with a web-based solution that included an intuitive WYSIWYG editor that even the most non-technical user could be comfortable using, as well as easy-to-navigate dashboard views for accessing wiki content or recently changed content. Socialtext also offered full version control and revision history for each wiki page for tracking changes, the ability to handle attachments like Microsoft Office documents added to wiki pages, as well as the ability to control access to the various internal and external wiki workspaces using authentication. Angel.com found that a key advantage of the Socialtext solution was the ability to control access to individual wiki workspaces using login and password credentials, as well as the ability to granularly define which users or groups could view content, make edits, add comments or provision new workspaces. This was particularly important for Angel, since they grew to use wikis not only internally, but also for strategic partner discussions, and even for creating a public community with the IVR Wiki site.
Hurdles / Challenges
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Lessons learned
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Screenshots
Link to Angel.com public IVR wiki - http://www.socialtext.net/ivrwiki/
Angel.com screens.ppt
Information about the case
Author
Case study authored by Jeff Brainard, Director of Marketing at Socialtext, and Sam Aparicio, Director of Product Management at Angel.com
Disclosures
Case study submitted by Socialtext, a wiki vendor
Comments / questions from readers
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