The enterprise content management and productivity space is crowded with competing solutions, but bigtincan thinks it has what it takes to compete with the likes of Basecamp and Dropbox (News - Alert) when it comes to enterprise productivity and the bring your own device (BYOD) trend. The company just released bigtincan hub, a platform where workers can use their own device to access and modify confidential company documents, applications and e-mail.
The focus is giving employees a way to access company files from their phone or tablet, and so far bigtincan has signed on more than 45 clients, including both SMBs and Fortune 500 companies.
Productivity and a social layer is what the company thinks will set it apart.
“We started to find out from customers that it’s great to push out content, but what they said to us was ‘we’d really like to have you guys help us with the productivity challenge and engage with content so that when I get the content on my device I can actually do my job better,’” bigtincan chief operating officer Patrick Welch told BetaKit last week.
Among the many features of the platform, bigtincan Hub features ContentSense, which delivers content quickly and securely to mobile devices; Secure + ShareLock, which provides an added layer of security for government and enterprise customers; PublisherApps, which lets Windows, Mac and Linux publish documents using Windows .Net or Adobe (News - Alert) AIR apps; and GroupControl, which lets users and channels be associated to a single group so it is easy to move people and content around.
Some of the other features include tabbed content browsing, social feed push notification, the ability to grant fine-grain access to content and comments about content, and an aggregation feature for creating a channel for each employee to stay up to date on the content and files they can access.
bigtincan hub integrates with SharePoint, Outlook, Citrix, Salesforce, SAP (News - Alert) and others, and works on all major operating systems, smartphones and tablets.
“Mobile workers can access content from their company’s servers both online and offline, and annotate, mark up, and edit documents including PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets which are saved and backed up to the client’s servers,” noted BetaKit.
The platform is custom-priced based on each client.
Whether bigtincan hub is different and useful enough to distinguish itself in the crowded field remains to be seen. For now, the company is banking on being useful and easy to use.
“Our focus is to get the right content in the hands of the right people so they can do their job better,” Welch told BetaKit. “Most content management systems in organizations have failed because when they start loading a lot of content into the system it gets really unwieldy and difficult for the end-user to find the most relevant content. So mobile has given us a really good opportunity to do things differently, to say let’s build a system that gets smarter as we load more content.”
Edited by Rachel Ramsey