2009 KM Promise Award winner | Inmagic
KM PROMISE AWARD
Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. One of the greatest challenges for organizations purchasing these technologies is to determine which of the companies will deliver on its promise. This award is given to the organization that is delivering the promise to its customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are embedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.
Inmagic has been an industry leader in knowledge management and library automation applications for more than 25 years. Today, it is at the forefront of the move to new generation knowledge management, creating Social Knowledge Networks (SKNs) that combine top-down, vetted information with bottom-up, social “wisdom of the community” to address critical research and business objectives.
More than 5,000 companies in 100 countries use Inmagic solutions, including Inmagic Presto, Inmagic Presto for Social Libraries and the DB/Text product family, to gain insight into customers, markets, competitors, research, intellectual properties and more.
How does this technology solution differ from others within the KM space?
Inmagic believes that while traditional content management systems (CMS) tend to be content producer-focused, and newer social networking applications tend to be people-to-people-focused, SKNs unite the two by providing access to diverse, vetted content that is enriched by the wisdom of the community. Unlike other available tools, SKNs are secure and built specifically with the enterprise in mind. They use the concepts and benefits of social technologies as a platform for knowledge management.
Presto is a social knowledge management platform designed to improve productivity and effectiveness within information-dependent communities by maximizing their information and human assets. The company believes Presto represents a fundamentally new approach to information and knowledge management for the enterprise by tightly integrating, into a single environment, a knowledge repository, information search, access and discovery tools, and the “wisdom of the community.”
Presto’s approach is said to yield an ideal application platform for integrating top-down vetted information with bottom-up social knowledge to address an organization’s most critical business problems. In the latest version of the technology, Presto moved to a Web Parts architecture. That has laid the groundwork for using Inmagic Web Parts in SharePoint and other ASP.NET applications and also for third-party ASP.NET Web Parts to work within Presto. Users from within SharePoint can query Inmagic Presto and see search results. Inmagic continues to develop Web Parts for SharePoint, and many Inmagic Presto features will work within a SharePoint environment, for example, collections, alerts, etc.
What does it promise its customers, and how is that promise delivered to customers?
Customers continue to adopt Inmagic solutions at a rapid rate over competing technologies in the special libraries and knowledge management markets. Inmagic addresses each customer’s set of information and social knowledge management challenges, business objectives and ROI expectations. Due to its robust technology, ease of use, deployment and attractive price point, Inmagic Presto has fast become the system of choice for organizations looking to address critical research and business objectives.
How is this promise being demonstrated in at least one customer organization today?
The City of Edmonton, Alberta, relies on Inmagic Presto as the backbone of its knowledge management solution. It has taken a leap forward in the way it stores and shares its archive of historical photographs and images. The city recently launched a new photo archives Web site, where users can search more than 25,000 images. The city had previously stored those images as hard copies in its archives building. Now, with its new site, users can search and access Edmonton’s images from their home computers. Edmonton’s site also lets researchers order image prints online and subscribe to RSS feeds that alert them when new content is added. That’s just the beginning of the tools that Edmonton is taking advantage of in Presto. In the coming months, the city plans to post many more photos, as well as maps and other digitized records for public consumption.