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The Marketing Communications organization at SuccessFactors was looking for a way to improve their process for managing their Corporate website. Many of the team members who contribute content to the site work remotely.
The team had a classic email-based version control problem. Multiple people would be assigned to work on a project or document. The hassle of figuring out who had the current version was a daily headache. Many documents were larger than what could be handled by the email system. The upload download process of either email or other file download systems was unwieldy given the fast pace and short timelines that the group had to deal with on a daily basis.
"Content Circles provided a perfect solution," said Mike Tomita, Marketing Communications Manager at SuccessFactors. "With Content Circles, a project leader creates a workgroup, invites people to join the workgroup and then adds files to workgroup 'Circle'. It is incredibly easy to install and you can be up and running in five minutes or less."
Content Circles uses a highly secure Peer-to-Peer solution that does not rely on the availability of outside servers, bandwidth limitations or file/storage size limits. The storage is driven by the amount of space any user wants to allocate on their computer. Files are passed directly to the recipient and are completely secure. The documents are stored and shared between the Content owner/creator and other members of the Circle. The documents are not stored or uploaded/downloaded to and from a third party server. The contents of the files are secure because Content Circles keeps only the meta data about where the file is, who it has been shared with, and who has opened, reviewed and/or edited the document, etc. The company never stores the actual files.
Using the Peer-to-Peer technology, the SuccessFactors Marketing Communications team does not need to reserve space on a server or involve IT in any way. Content Circles runs in the background on the user's machine and does not impact others tasks or applications.
Even when users set up the Content Circles Store and Forward Service to maintain current versions when all members of the Circle are offline, that computer is part of the existing network of the Circle Owner and the contents are kept equally secure.
SuccessFactors is now beginning to use Content Circles as collaborative repository for sharing current collateral materials with other departments, starting with Product Marketing. When publishing collateral internally or publicly, it is critical to ensure that the most current, approval versions are released. Content Circles enables the original content creators to ensure that version mistakes do not happen.
The Marketing Communications group has also used Content Circles for moving large documents such as videos with outside vendors. The same benefits apply; email file size limits eliminate that option. While legacy FTP solutions provide limited basic file transfer capabilities, these tools offer no file tracking or revision control, so maintaining the correct versions is very difficult.
Since the Marketing Communications group started using Content Circles, the team have benefitted from a number of improvements in their day-to-day operations and processes.
- It is much easier to collaborate on documents from any location, so there are fewer delays due to technology factors such as email or outside service availability
- Content creators and editors can pass files back and forth without having to worry about the performance of remote third party servers
- Collaboration with internal clients (like Product Marketing) is faster, easier and less error-prone, so the team can meet and exceed deadlines can with a higher degree of certainty
- The ability to make faster revisions to documents and collect comments and feedback on those documents during the writing and editing phase means quicker overall turnaround
- Better auditing and reporting enable managers to more closely track the progress on specific documents and projects
- Revision control capabilities eliminate the need to do 'diff' file comparisons between documents to determine what changes have been made
- The ability to add and delete member of a workgroup in seconds enables the team to rapidly adapt to changing project and personnel requirements.
"Content Circles has helped improve the accuracy and on-time delivery of documents and projects developed in the Marketing Communications Department at SuccessFactors," said Mike Tomita. "It is easy to install, simple to use, and you immediately begin to notice the results. I can see the tangible ROI of Content Circles every day."