Till 2010, Twitter styled micro blogging/collaboration platform were the talk for enterprise segment and 2011 will witness a lot of Quora like services being launched that will enable companies to create a knowledge bank based on employees’ activity.
CorpAns is a Hyderabad based startup that wants to be the Quora ++ for Enterprise segment. The product essentially brings an intranet+inter work place interactions and let employees ask questions within the private company network or within the Corpans network.
You need a corporate ID to get started and posts are grouped as
- ASK:You can absolutely ask, anything under the sun. However, we strongly advise you to be respectful and responsible while asking anything. Please read a few dummy use-case scenarios, below, to understand “#asks” better.
- NEED: Need a mobile phone, a place to stay or a tenant for your 2 bedroom apartment! Post it on Corpans and let your colleagues on Corpans help you out !
- SELL: You can sell an item. Simply list original price/expected price/select the right category etc and list your item for sale.
The Users are grouped based on their Company and Location. Private posts are visible only to the colleagues (i.e, same @CompanyName id). Public posts will be visible to all the people from given location.
The service is essentially a QnA+Classified service for enterprise companies and the core idea is to build a trusted network of individuals who will answer each others’ query (like StartupQnA.com) and in turn, build a knowledge bank for companies/projects.
Once you start using the service, Corpans will send you a collated digest every day and hopefully, you will have lesser emails to read thru’ (i.e. improved productivity).
Feedback/Suggestions
The service is at a very high level right now. The service expects users to create account (using company id), though if they really want traction they need to sell this to CXO/IT departments and integrate with existing user ids.
There are enough collaboration tools available for enterprise [see this list of Free Collaboration and Sync Tools for Startups, Free Tools for Startups – How to Grow without Spending in IT, Free Web Video Conferencing Tools) and several startups (BootStrapToday, Dunnitt, PebbleTalk etc) are already operating in this (i.e. enterprise collaboration) space.
The earlier buzz was ‘Twitter’ like collaboration and is slowly shifting towards QnA based knowledge management platform – thought the adoption of these new platform has been very namesake and limited to few geographies (and companies) only.
Apart from adoption challenges, i.e. you are expecting employees (and their managers) to change their behavior most of these services end up competing with a lot of free tools available in the market. So unless there is a huge differentiation (of support/integration with existing systems like ERP/CRM/HRMS etc), moving upwards in the enterprise maze is a huge challenge.
What’s your opinion on Corpans?
[Corpans is started by the same team that TweetKnot, a startup that received a bit of bad love from Facebook and Twitter because of its ‘Tweet’ name.]
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