CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Here is a robust entry into the enterprise collaboration market in some very innovative features that take advantage of the social potential on the Web.  I recently spoke with Carlin Wiegner, CEO and co-founder, Ross Fubini, CTO and co-founder, and Gita Gupta, VP of Marketing at CubeTree. They each come from a strong enterprise software background. Carlin and Ross were together at Symantec where they saw the need for strong enterprise collaboration tools.

Collaboration is where the value is generated and until recently we didn’t have good tools for this. I mentioned the classic McKinsey article because they were aware of the next revolution in interactions.  It stated that the real value of the organization is in its interactions between people, and yet the IT investment until a few years ago had been almost all on transactions. CubeTree is designed to address and correct this issue.

Employees today are more aware of the possibilities and value of online collaboration. In the 90s this awareness often had to be trained. Now people expect and demand it. Ross, who came from a portal background, mentioned that portals were often under used. The goal was usually driving usage. Now the goal is supporting users. In the 90s IT had the money and power and now the power shift is back to the business users. I have seen this transformation firsthand, as I moved from enterprise portal implementations to enterprise 2.0, and certainly agree with his view.

The emphasis on users makes the social network and each individual user the logical center of a collaboration system. This is what CubeTree has done. Each user has  a profile with background information. It includes  blog posts, chat rooms, documents, info on following and follower, goals, groups, links, photos, polls, wiki pages and trips with the ability to drill down on each of these activities. Here is a sample.

There is also a Wall, similar in many ways to a Facebook profile. In the Wall, there are Twitter-like status feeds. The status feeds can be both user generated and auto-generated. The user can select the applications that will auto-generate activity status feeds. You can also send emails to the status feed or have the system send you an email on periodic basis asking for a status update which gets put into the feed. Here is a sample feed.

I like that the status feeds occur within the context of the collaboration platform. As I have mentioned before I think that within the enterprise Twitter-like applications work best within the context of a large collaboration platform as CubeTree does. However, on the consumer Web I think they work better as a standalone feed as Twitter does.

Users are able to vote on content in the system. This enables crowd sourcing. There are a variety of metrics on people, their activities and the voting around feeds as shown in the dashboard below.

CubeTree uses this feature from UserVoice.com to gather users’ feedback for product enhancements. Every week they post potential ideas for the next weekly release of CubeTree. Then they harvest this feedback and incorporate it into their next releases. At the same time they look at user actions through data warehousing to supplement their read on user opinions through voting. This is walking the talk in terms of both using the platform and what you do with it.

The way CubeTree conducts the polls helps spread the questioning. Using a Twitter-like asymmetrical follower/following model, you can see the votes of all the people you are following and then share this along with your vote to your followers. You can vote right on the feed item to enable this. This enables the viral spread of issues, and promotes both engagement on the issue at hand but future engagement as people expand their networks by seeing what others are doing.

A full suite of collaboration tools is built on top of CubeTree’s social networking platform, and includes micro-blogging, wikis, blogs, polls, goals management, travel-itinerary sharing, file sharing, link sharing, search, and more. However, the core is the social networking platform that builds collaboration into all the features and serves as the common ground for sharing content, ideas, and everything else. For example, you get all the collaborative updating and other social features in the wiki.

A robust feed architecture allows users to broadcast their activities from within CubeTree, as well as from other collaboration tools. CubeTree integrates with more than a dozen consumer and enterprise products including Twitter®, Google™ Docs and Google™ Reader, Salesforce.com®, meetings from WebEx™ and Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ Pro, and project management updates from Basecamp®.

CubeTree is private and secure, ensuring a company’s proprietary files, images, updates and internal communications remain confidential. Only employees with the same email domain can access their company’s CubeTree network, and every page request is securely served via HTTPS. The standard version includes basic security features including SSL and community user disable; for companies requiring greater policy controls, CubeTree offers premium versions that provide additional security features including access restrictions based on IP addresses or browser, password policies and the ability to turn features on and off for all users.

There are three levels of functionality to choose from. The standard level is free. CubeTree states that this version will always be free. Then there are two levels of premium functionality. The Professional level is designed for groups and the Enterprise level for entire organizations. Within an organization you can have people operating on different service levels. CubeTree is totally cloud-based and deploys a new updated version to the cloud every week.

One of the initial CubeTree investors is Mitch Kapor, of Lotus fame. I think they are well positioned to be a significant player in the growing field of enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms. The team understands how online collaboration works and is drawing on some of the best features of the consumer Web but adapting them for business use.