Pathway Software is a software and services company located in Halifax, United Kingdom (UK). The mission of Pathway Software is to help dramatically improve the delivery, measurement and efficacy of Therapy Services in the UK's NHS (National Health Service). Pathway is an example of a new generation software providers who deliver nimble, flexible solutions that can be quickly deployed and then rapidly deliver measurable improvements in the quality of care.
Pathway was founded with the objective of building a highly efficient, productive and profitable software venture from the ground up. This philosophy provided the executive team the opportunity to look at every desired business process and evaluate comparable structures encountered in their past experience. Each required Pathway business process could then be designed using innovative and modern tools and technologies to maximize productivity in the business.
The Pathway Software founders have between 15 and 20 years of experience in large enterprise software companies such as SCO, SAS Institute and Oracle. As a result, the team has a deep understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of legacy enterprise solutions and the tools and technologies traditionally used to develop and maintain these solutions.
The company made a number of complementary technology decisions to facilitate the growth of a nimble, fast moving organization. Pathway chose to build and run their business entirely on the Mac platform. "We have been able to avoid the traditional stability and reliability issues that we have faced in the past, as well as virtually eliminating the viruses that routinely invaded our previous computing platforms," said Bob Bond, Founder, Pathway Software.
The company maintains a distributed organization, with employees working in different locations. An early objective of the organization was to establish business processes using technologies that maximized the efficiency of a geographically dispersed organization. People in multiple locations needed access to the correct, most up-to-date files, when and where they are needed. Like most organizations, documents in every part of the organization are created, edited and revised several times before they are finalized. Many of the company’s key documents are reviewed and edited by staff members in the same or other departments that may be geographically remote from that document's creator.
"We evaluated a number of technologies, including Box.net during our technology acquisition cycle," said Bond. "Box.net did not meet our needs or expectations for overall usability. In a fast moving start-up environment, we look for products that facilitate our business processes, not get in the way of them. The absence of commonly used and expected features like 'drag-and-drop' made Box.net an untenable solution for Pathway. Our employees must to be able to adopt products and services with ease so they can be highly effective in their respective roles. Content Circles met those expectations exceptionally well. The fact that the application runs transparently on the Mac and Windows platforms is an added bonus for when we work with people outside of our network who are on the PC platform."
After years of developing highly complex enterprise content management solutions and building a deep understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of traditional platforms, the development team built Content Circles around highly secure Peer-to-Peer technologies. Documents are exchanged directly between the owner of the Circle and the members of the Circle that the Circle owner has authorized and invited. The files do not have to be uploaded to or downloaded to/from third party cloud-based server solutions that are out of your control. There is no need to ever send files through email solutions and the often un-protected gateways associated with moving messages and documents over email.
An index of the owners and members of every circle and the disposition of every document in the Circle is maintained at Content Circles. This index is referred to as "Meta-Data." It is information about the content, not the content itself. Users of Content Circles can be confident that no one other than the intended recipients can get access to documents in a circle. As a result there are no extra fees for server usage, network usage, uploading or downloading of files. Content Circles users store files on their computer and the computers of other Circle Members, so there is no IT staff required to maintain centralized applications.
Content Circles is the repository of record for all corporate documents at Pathway. Workgroups (Circles) are set up with Content Circles for each functional area of the company. Authorized users are quickly and easily defined for each of the Circles. Developers have access to Circles relating to product development and testing, for example. Separate Circles have been created to cover marketing, legal, finance, etc. Only a select group of employees have access to Circles containing company legal and finance issues. Project Management Circles are set up for each project in which the company is engaged. These Circles facilitate the exchange of documents that relate to the project.
Pathway uses a variety of technology solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), project management and other business processes. Certain documents are also exchanged within these other systems, but the source documents of record are always kept in the appropriate Content Circles folder.
"I was particularly impressed with how Content Circles works in both small and large environments," said Bond. "While our company does not presently need large-scale ECM (Enterprise Content Management) solutions, I was very impressed with how Content Circles has developed both Connectors to these systems and partnerships with the providers. I was particularly impressed by the company's relationship with Alfresco Software, the developer of a powerful ECM solution I was familiar with from prior roles in enterprise organizations."
"While it may seem obvious, 'productivity solutions' cannot reduce the productivity of your team. Content Circles is simply effortless to use. It is a great solution for our business because of the nearly transparent way that the solution functions in our environment," said Bond. "It facilitates our business and never adds layers of process and learning curve. From small organizations to large companies, Content Circles would be a valuable asset to any organization."