Interact transformed itself from a development firm to a software provider in the last eleven years as they learned the needs of their clients. I recently spoke with Nigel Danson (@nigeldanson on twitter) about the evolution of their firm and their comprehensive software offering. They started in 1999 in the UK. In 2002 they developed an intranet for the UK operations of Pfizer. During this effort they saw the effectiveness of de-centralizing the management of content to have it more closely align with the specific needs of individual business units. They also saw the need for ease of use by business users. These two principles became important components of the software offering they developed.
The people who are closest to the business are the ones who can provide the most useful and most accurate content. Business users also want to reduce the involvement of IT. Interact targeted firms in the 500 to 5,000 employee range. These firms are large enough to need a comprehensive platform for content and collaboration. At the same time they are not so large as to look for multiple solutions and will benefit from a single integrated platform. This makes sense to me. They started in the UK but have now expanded globally and have a sales office in the US. There are over 500,000 users with average customer having 1,500 employees.
Part of the ease of use lies in both ease of content access but also developing a way for the right content to proactively find the right people. One means for this is the feature, Interact Recommends. When you add a new document it adds additional metadata to support this purpose. It also looks for related content and recommends it to you. Related people are also uncovered and recommended. I like this feature. It can lead to a lot of useful unexpected discovery.
Another support for ease of use is the intuitive interface. You can see a sample home page screen below. There is a range of functionality that can be configured by the user and the administrator without any IT knowledge or skill. Features are added through widgets.
The tag cloud in the screen above is generated in several ways that can be configured. For example, you can display the most popular documents. You can see what has been searched for in the last three months. You can limit it to a specific topic or area. I like this customization capability.
There are also blogs and micro-blogs. The micro-blog entries can be auto-generated by user actions, as well as manually by user input. Another useful tool is @tagging of content – allowing the user to easily link to intranet content including documents, events and people. There is a robust search feature that allows for filtering by a number of parameters. You can see a sample search screen below. Filters include: documents, people, forums, calendars posts and questions. You can ask Interact questions and it takes the question to people who mostly likely have the answers. You can then tag the answer you like the best and it gets elevated in the search results. The search function can also be configured by such aspects as: ratings from users and how often the item was searched for.
You can also create forms such as PO requests and attach workflow to them. One of the features I especially liked was the statistics. You can see a sample screen below. Since an intranet is more about the people, that is the focus of the analytics. Like many other aspects of Interact, you can configure the analytics. You can also get user feedback in order to make changes to better meet user needs. There is even a Find the Treasure tab that is used for system training purposes. You can create a pirate and then require people to go to certain places to look for him. They also have an open API and mobile support.
Interact is sponsoring an intranet event in London in October. It looks interesting with well-known speakers I have heard such as James Robertson. I really like what they have accomplished. It seems to be a very useful system for the mid-size market and I can see why Interact has achieved significant customer growth.
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