We've been speaking to a number of prospective customers over the last few weeks around our new combined offering of Office 365 (for a great email and calendaring service) and OnePlace (for comprehensive email management).

It's generating a lot of interest. But one of the interesting points for us is that a number of these companies like the solution because it solves the issue related to public folders not being available in Office 365.

Many companies are currently running Microsoft Exchange 2007 or Microsoft Exchange 2010 on site and rely heavily on the use of public folders in order to file and share emails. Although this isn't a recommended approach for large scale collaboration and email management, it serves its purpose and many businesses rely on the use of public folders as part of their working process. A lot of these companies would like to move to Office 365 / BPOS but the lack of public folder support stops them.

It was a pleasant surprise to us, but customers have recognised that KnowledgeMill OnePlace solves this problem. By filing emails into Contexts (essentially a shared project area) within OnePlace, companies now have a public folder filing system with all the advantages that OnePlace brings (collaboration, ediscovery, archiving, compliance, lifeycle management - you get the idea - browse the web site for more info). The great thing is that access to the filed content is available in Outlook just like public folders are. You can file emails very quickly whilst composing, drag and drop, file whole folders. You also have access the shared folders on the web, on your iphone, ipad, and SharePoint sites. Very cool. OnePlace is designed to work alongside Office 365 and the integration is seamless.

Another sweet thing is that we have migration path as well (again rather foolishly without even realising it). Our "associative filing" feature means that you select any folder in Exchange (including a public folder) and synchronise it with a folder in OnePlace. This means that any email that is in the Exchange folder is automatically pushed across into OnePlace. Hey presto - an really simple way to migrate your public folder data across. Given that it continuously synchronises the email data it also enables co-existence as you gradually migrate your users across from the on-site Exchange to Office 365.

Although this video is oriented towards law firms, it gives you the idea on how users access OnePlace folders directly through Outlook. It's only a few minutes long so check it out below. Or watch it on the KnowledgeMill YouTube Channel.

So what’s so smart about KnowledgeMill’s email management solution? In the first draft of this blog, I had a bit of a pop at alternative solutions. Cheap, unprofessional and ultimately self-seeking you’ll be glad to hear I canned that one. Instead, I thought I’d put myself in the shoes of key people at a law firm and figure out what “smart” would mean to them. The results are below. My thinking is that if your current email management solution doesn’t do ALL of these then it’s not “smart”. Read them, do a bit of role playing yourself and let me know how you get on.

The Partner

“A smart email management solution improves the profitability of the Firm”.

Better collaboration, greater efficiency, improved services and lower costs. It’s an open-and-shut case with OnePlace. KnowledgeMill helps you streamline your company’s operations and save money.

The Lawyer

“A smart email management solution increases my productivity and that of my team”.

Seamless integration with Outlook coupled with associative, bulk and suggestive filing takes the pain out of filing. Asynchronous filing ensures no Outlook lockups and wasted time. The OnePlace suite of applications improves user experience and productivity, helping users find important email more quickly and reliably.

The IT manager

“A smart email management solution reduces cost”. OnePlace reduces the cost and complexity of IT environments and provides flexibility with an environment that can scale to accommodate not just email but all electronically stored information. OnePlace’s appliance license model means no hidden 3rd party software costs.

The Risk Manager

“A smart email management solution protects the Firm”.

OnePlace drives good governance practices by retaining email in accordance with company policy and mitigates legal risk associated with mismanaged email. Its integrated eDiscovery module reduces cost.

The Business Development Manager

“A smart email management solution helps build client relationships”.

OnePlace provides real-time analytics on social networks. At a glance, users can see social networks internally within the business, identifying key influencers, evolving teams and informal groups. Similarly, they can look at social networks between employees and customer contacts.

If your current email management solution doesn’t do some of the above I wouldn’t say it was necessarily “dumb” but it’s certainly not as smart as ours. Intrigued but not entirely convinced? That’s an easy one to resolve - request a demo of KnowledgeMill’s smart email management solution or a FREE 30 day trial and draw your own conclusions!!

KnowledgeMill, the privately held innovative software provider, is basing its next generation enterprise content management products on Oracle technology.

James Allchin, Chief Architect of KnowledgeMill said, “Enterprises are generating unstructured data at unprecedented levels. With this rise comes data complexity, and challenges around integration of content sources, connectivity and performance. Embedding Oracle 11g R2 with its powerful database clustering, data center automation, and workload management capabilities allows us to engineer efficient, scalable content management solutions that deliver critical information at the right time to help your business make better decisions faster.”

Mike Thompson, ISV Partner Group Manager at Oracle says of the announcement, “Oracle Database 11g R2, built on 30 years of design experience, is today delivering the next generation of enterprise information management. Oracle Database 11g R2 delivers the key features KnowledgeMill need to present their customers with innovation that addresses the real content management challenges they are facing.”

KnowledgeMill have already delivered strong results using Oracle technology. Our email management solution "OnePlace" built on an Oracle platform organizes and manages email data by legal matter and in doing so enables significant cost reductions, improved business collaboration and empower enterprises to meet compliance and regulatory obligations. For legal firms requiring advanced document management features, KnowledgeMill now offers OnePlace for Legal which uses the Oracle platform to extend that capability to include other file types, and deliver a solution that handles all types of unstructured information.

Hisham Anis, CEO of KnowledgeMill has plans to deliver more. “KnowledgeMill’s solutions work whether you are hosting your own infrastructure, or hosting it from within the Cloud. This is a pointer of things to come”, he says. “Our mission is to become the leading provider of innovative, efficient, context enriched Enterprise Content Management solutions for the legal sector and other industry verticals, both in the Cloud and for traditionally hosted solutions. Through choosing Oracle for our database platform, we are well positioned to deliver this.”

KnowledgeMill OnePlace is a Next Generation content management platform based on the Oracle 11g R2 platform. Key features and benefits include:

• Enriched user experience through a single view of all content in its relevant context (for example, project, client or legal matter);
• Context derived from existing IT systems for relevance and ease of adoption by end users;
• Distilling business critical items from all other content makes intelligent information lifecycle management possible and leads to reduced operating cost;
• Consolidated enterprise architecture reduces hardware footprint without scalability or performance limitations;
• Real-time context analytics and business intelligence derives value from otherwise dormant data;
• eDiscovery module provides instant access to all email and document data across any dimension providing organizations with a powerful tool with which to meet their regulatory and compliance obligations.

About KnowledgeMill Ltd

KnowledgeMill is a new market entrant focused on innovative content software technologies. Founded in 2009 by solution architects working within the legal sector, KnowledgeMill has established strategic partnerships with Oracle, Microsoft and EMC to develop for their content platforms. For more information, visit www.knowledgemill.com

We have move to a great new Office around the corner from our old place.

Our new address is :

KnowledgeMill
6 Maidstone Building Mews
72-76 Borough High Street
London SE1 1GD
United Kingdom