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Angel.com Engages All Teams in Collaboration

“We hit the wall with our open source wiki. The ultra-reliable Socialtext hosted service now provides the enterprise-class features our business demanded, so our whole company can now leverage the power of wikis. Socialtext is the collaboration platform-of-choice for Angel.com. We use Socialtext Workspace for our employees, our strategic business partners, and even as the foundation for our public customer community.”

Read the CIO Insight story about Angel.com and Socialtext.

Background

Angel.com, a subsidiary of MicroStrategy (NASD: MSTR), is a leading provider of on-demand Integrated Voice Response (IVR) and call center solutions. Founded in 1999, Angel.com has provided over 10,000 telephony solutions to more than 1,600 customers, including Borland, Raytheon, Jiffy Lube, Kellogg’s and Reebok.

Angel.com applications are built, deployed and managed entirely through a web browser, requiring no additional investment in hardware, software or human resources. And because Angel.com applications require no additional resources, the solutions are deployed quickly, usually in just days, so customers can more quickly benefit from a return on investment and improved customer support.

Like many technology companies, Angel.com’s team had some existing experience with wikis before they considered a commercial solution. Angel.com initially used an early open source wiki for tracking project management tasks. Prior to IT formally selecting a wiki solution, various wikis were deployed by product management and engineering for various functions. For example, product management used a wiki to capture product requirements and specifications, and to document use cases, while engineering used a wiki to track development progress, schedules and technical documentation. As the usage of these various wikis grew, so did concerns about their feature limitations. Some key missing capabilities included core collaboration features such as the ability to track edits and revisions to wiki pages, attach documents to wiki pages, and control who can view and edit content in each wiki. The frustration around feature gaps was further compounded by the fact that an increasing number of non-technical users, like marketing, sales and executive management wanted to use the wiki, but found themselves challenged by the daunting user experience and complicated wiki markup language.

Looked for highest adoption rate and fastest business results

Based on Angel.com’s history and model of delivering software-as-a-service for their core business, it was only natural that as they considered a wiki solution for greater functionality, they looked for a hosted wiki service. Angel.com assessed a number of wiki alternatives, and Socialtext's reputation for delivering a solid, reliable product that delivered the highest adoption rate and fastest business results came out on top. The Socialtext hosted service was selected by Angel.com for its reliability, ease of use, and rich enterprise-ready feature set.

Got immediate adoption, fast results

When Angel.com deployed Socialtext’s hosted wiki service, the adoption was immediate and the user satisfaction very high. The Socialtext enterprise-class features met the company’s needs, and Angel.com users got the easy-to-use solution they were seeking. Very quickly, adoption spread from the early users in product management and engineering to include operations, marketing, sales, professional services and even technical documentation staff. The operations team first used Socialtext Workspace for communicating service upgrades and schedules. Marketing and sales first used the collaboration platform to start an ongoing conversation that captured new competitive intelligence in a persistent way, and to create a library for sales collateral and sales tools, not only to track the latest versions but to surround the documents with context about how and when to use each and to create feedback loops to keep them fresh. Technical documentation's first use of the wiki was to collaborate on creating and editing documents.

Found a much better way to collaborate

Prior to using Socialtext Workspace, Angel.com people used documents sent around as attached files in emails. The documents were sometimes also stored on their corporate intranet. Socialtext Workspace gives Angel.com a much more efficient way to collect valuable insight from multiple contributors, to create a corporate memory of that insight, to surround deliverables with context, and to allow team members in all departments to engage in a collaborative way. It also lets Angel.com people work openly in a way that others can benefit from, letting them discover valuable work of others via notifications, update feeds, tagging and search, and then re-use that work.

Extended collaboration benefits to customers and business partners

As Angel.com’s adoption of the collaboration platform continued to grow internally, they soon realized that by extending the wiki to their customers and business partners they could realize similar collaborative benefits with these critical constituencies. So Angel.com launched their public IVR Wiki, which was geared to their customer and partner audiences. The IVR Wiki site provides resources and additional information for individuals interested in discussing IVR-related topics, as well as updates from Angel.com on corporate news, product releases and development-related topics. One interesting thing that Angel.com decided to do was employ the Socialtext collaboration platform for opening up their technical documentation, so anyone visiting the IVR Wiki could read the documentation online, but also anyone could make contributions and enhance the documentation. Customers and the community at large now contribute to the wiki, edit the technical documents, add to the portfolio of best practices and provide valuable use-case examples. In addition to the public IVR Wiki, Angel.com has also started deploying wikis for strategic partner discussions.

Makes decisions more quickly

With the authentication capabilities of Socialtext Workspace, Angel.com staff can invite key partners into a wiki workspace where they can securely communicate and collaborate with one another and create a centralized, shared repository of information assets. Increasingly, Socialtext Workspace is replacing the old communication model of emails sent back and forth between selected corporate staff and selected people in partner organizations. Using Socialtext collaboration platform with partners, discussions are more open and accessible, everyone involved is more informed and engaged, decisions are made more quickly, and collaboration happens more seamlessly.

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