CollabLayer – Executive Summary

“CollabLayer, is a cloud-based collaboration tool for professionals and enterprises. CollabLayer amplifies enterprise effectiveness by enabling collaborative content consumption, discussions in context and rapid discovery of insight within content in near real-time.”

Sorry, that was quite a mouthful. So lets look at three concrete ways in which CollabLayer can help your organization and you.

• Collaborative Content Consumption
• Discussions in Context
• Insight Discovery

Lets consider each of these items quickly.

Collaborative Content Consumption

Why is collaborative consumption important?

• Without sharing of knowledge between teams and departments, you only have “silos of skills and data”. A subject matter expert you badly need sits on a floor above yours and yet you have no clue where to seek help on a proposal. Interactions around shared content reveals the perspectives and skills a person brings to the table.
• On the flip side, you don’t want too add to the digital noise. You need a discussion area with a curated list of collaborators.

How CollabLayer helps

• With its simple content sharing tools CollabLayer makes it easy to share, consume and discuss around relevant documents, interesting links and more. A separate workspace allows you to control membership. Invite people from across functions to receive and contribute value to the workspace.
• All content shared within CollabLayer is instantly searchable. Documents, web pages and the conversations around them..bottom line if the content is inside CollabLayer it is findable.

Discussions in Context

Why context is key for discussions?

• Think of document reviews done with a cross functional team. Email is often used to have these review discussions. Say its a sales proposal, or a creative campaign, or a litigation document. Usually the feedback and comments are done via email or via instant messaging systems. Discussions float in digital space without being anchored to a specific section within your document. Or even worse, you use Microsoft Office to track what comments were added or feedback given.

How CollabLayer helps

• Content and the Conversations around them are both first class citizens in CollabLayer. Collaborative document reviews can be done in real-time. This is not screen sharing, where one person determines what the rest see. Each person can view the document independently, annotate & highlight sections along with comments. Each action is sent out to all collaborators, within that project, in real-time.
• Long running discussions are a nightmare to follow in email. In CollabLayer, there is utter clarity in what is being said, in what context and all this without modifying your document. Parallelize your document reviews and see the difference for yourself.

Insight Discovery

Why insight discovery in a collaboration tool?

• Most tools play a passive role in helping you collaborate with your teams. Remember the document repository on your intranet? How much key information do you think is hidden there? Sure, it is searchable but that requires an explicit action from you. We believe digital tools should do more.

How CollabLayer helps

• CollabLayer tries to understand your textual content. It presents key entities mentioned in the document. Names of people, location and organizations are extracted and displayed. Get a quick sense of what the document is about without opening it.
• If a particular person or organization catches your interest, you can choose to watch them. The next time content is uploaded by you or anybody else, for which you have permission to see, CollabLayer will notify you that a match has been found. Imagine that, you could watch for what matters within your content 24/7. This will work for documents and webpages. Support for more content sources is planned, talk to us if you have a preference.
• At the simplest level, think of it as saved search. Yet, there are exciting possibilities already in the pipeline and we can’t wait to show them to you!

We are accepting registrations for CollabLayer. Some points regarding the preview. CollabLayer is free during beta and you will be able to take all your data back. CollabLayer is hosted on the Amazon Cloud and your documents are stored in Amazon S3. Bottom line your data is secure and you should have no impediments to trying the product out. Let us know if you need more information or help to get you started with CollabLayer.

Sign up, follow us here or here for updates. There is much more that we have planned for CollabLayer, love to have you join our journey.