Month of August, 2008

One year ago today, we started Content Circles, Inc. with the idea of changing the way people manage and collaborate on content. From our experience in content creation with Adobe PDF and content management at Xerox DocuShare, we understand the value of documents and their essential role in business.

However, with all the maturity of content creation and content management systems over the years, the fundamental problem of content collaboration remains a relatively unsolved mystery. There are several basic problems in content collaboration today:

• Almost every document requires multiple collaborators and multiple review cycles.
• The majority of business documents require collaboration beyond the comfortable confines of an internal team.
• Large Enterprise Content Management systems require too much change in user behavior to be used reliably and effectively.
• Email is fine for simple content collaboration between a couple of users but fails miserably as more users and more documents are involved.

At Content Circles, we have challenged ourselves to rethink content collaboration. We believe:

• Content is created on the desktop so that is where collaboration needs to begin.
• Existing tools for content creation are mature and do not need to be replaced.
• Existing systems for storing and managing content are mature and do not need to be replaced.
• Email is not going away and will continue to be a major collaborative tool.
• Never forget that the user is the source of documents so the system needs to fit their work process--not the other way around.

As a result, we have designed and built Content Circles as a rich desktop client which interfaces to existing content creation and content management tools but allows users to work they way they want to work. No more manual upload/download. No more wondering if you have the latest content. No more worrying about how to collaborate with someone outside of the company.

It took longer to get to this point than we had anticipated, but we think you will find it was worth the wait. Content Circles eliminates the biggest headaches in content collaboration and once you use the system you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

Content collaboration will never be the same. Enjoy the Beta.