Premiere business-to-business deal- and process-management SaaS maker IntraLinks reveals its roadmap for a transformation into a real-time collaboration network.
Premiere business-to-business deal- and process-management SaaS maker IntraLinks reveals its roadmap for a transformation into a real-time collaboration network. Already an industry leader in secure, cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) tools that more than 1 million business users are accessing to communicate, share documents and manage critical business processes, IntraLinks recently revealed its roadmap for transforming into a real-time collaborative network, complete with community-building toolsets.
"Today, we have over 70 enterprise use cases where we provide secure SaaS solutions for high-value transactions, such as mergers and acquisition deals," said John Landy, chief technology officer at IntraLinks. "But looking forward, we are investing heavily in a roadmap that provides enhanced case-management tools for adaptive workflows, community-building, and structured collaboration you can use online or off."
IntraLinks' community-building efforts permit the user base to interact by maintaining profiles, contact lists and analytics regarding opportunities to participate in upcoming projects.
(Source: IntraLinks)
IntraLinks users access the company’s services either with their Web browser or with the IntraLinks' mobile applications for iPad, iPhone or BlackBerry. Once signed in, users can access templates of best practices that simplify the use of containers to exchange documents relevant to their particular business process. This multi-tenet SaaS solution allows users to search across workspaces to find and exchange documents, no matter where they are stored. Besides its two data centers, IntraLinks maintains two additional SunGuard protected repositories for secure documents, as well as multi-factor protocols and encryption services for users that request the highest level of security.
For the future, IntraLinks has embarked on a year-long transformation process that will be incrementally released over the rest of the year, and which beta-testers are already helping debug.
"Pharmaceutical companies already use us today for their start-up processes when they have a new drug study, making all the documentation available and making sure [participants] have uploaded all the proper forms. Now we want to build additional use cases around that model," Landy said, adding that this is an area where the company plans to make great investments going forward.
The first enhanced SaaS capability will be a new case-management process that IntraLinks calls "guided collaboration," which will provide adaptive workflow monitoring and tracking of due-diligence processes, including approvals, all of which will be managed from convenient dashboards.
The second major enhancement to its offerings will formalize community access for its million-strong user base, allowing individuals to search and find colleagues with whom they have previously worked, or who have skill sets that are relevant to a new project they are starting. The social-networking-style interface will provide both individuals and enterprises with a marketplace-style community, allowing new projects to be offered and skill sets to be hawked using industry-specific tagging schemes.
The third new capability will build on a separate IntraLinks application called the Courier, which is used offline to automate the process of electronically exchanging documents for red-lining and approvals, thus eliminating the need for faxing or courier exchanges of physical documents. The new improved Courier SaaS, now called by its internal code name, "Project Collabrio, " will be integrated with IntraLinks portals to provide real-time collaboration services including Chat.
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