After two years of talking to potential customers and furiously building a product, we are thrilled to unveil Highspot, a cloud knowledge management service that helps organizations capture, share, and cultivate their most valuable working knowledge.
The inspiration for Highspot came from our collective frustration that our previous organizations had the potential to be much more effective if they “only knew what they knew.” The information existed to make the organizations smarter, but it simply wasn’t available to the people who needed it when they needed it. Some of this vital working knowledge was formal, such as documents and presentations about a new product launch, while other knowledge was more informal such as the fruits of hard-won experience. But regardless of whether formal or informal, most organizations really struggle to capture, share, and cultivate the collective working knowledge of the organization.
This is particularly true for frontier functions like engineering, marketing, and sales that operate at the edge of institutional knowledge. They have an insatiable demand for the latest and greatest information to win the next deal, fend off competitors, captivate customers, and inspire innovation. As often as not, the information they need to win the day exists, it just isn’t available when it matters.
Highspot attacks the knowledge management problem by applying four principles:
- Leverage familiar consumer Web experiences. The more users love the system, the better Highspot can deliver relevant information. We have worked hard to use familiar paradigms from consumer services so training needs are minimal and users naturally engage.
- Build a comprehensive knowledge graph. To effectively “know what you know,” Highspot must cast the broadest possible net for information, and gracefully incorporate content wherever it is created, whatever its type, and wherever it is consumed. We are committed to integrate with information wherever it resides, including across widely used services such as Office 365, Google Apps, Box, Dropbox, and Salesforce as well as information types as diverse as documents, presentations, spreadsheets, images, videos, audio, news feeds, and news alerts.
- Increase relevance through advanced machine learning. Taking a page from the Internet, Highspot uses advanced techniques pioneered by consumer companies from Google to Amazon to Pinterest. Our machine learning platform delivers highly relevant results that get even more relevant over time.
- Deliver a modern cloud service. Highspot is a secure, scalable cloud service ready for the demands of enterprises. As a cloud service, there is no complex software to deploy or manage, and the service is available any time from any device.
Highspot builds upon these pillars to deliver a wide range of features:
- Search that works. Search is a fantastic tool on the Web, but it hasn’t worked well inside of organizations. Now it does by increasing relevance through the power of data science and machine learning.
- Discover the unknown. Search is great when you know what you need, but sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. Highspot automatically brings the latest and most relevant information to your attention.
- Browse in context. Information benefits from being placed in context. Quickly preview and visualize documents and see related discussions and recommendations from colleagues to zero in on what you need.
- Re:organize, re:share. Empower your people and teams to organize content in whatever way they see fit. Create and securely share Spots which are collections of related content.
- Information genomics. Follow information as it evolves. Track documents as they mutate, see how they are being used, and understand which are most useful by following the survival of the fittest.
- Your knowledge, anywhere. Securely access your information any time from your computer, tablet, or phone.
- Cloud delivery. Quickly create a secure solution without costly infrastructure to deploy or manage.
Early customers including Parallels, Buuteeq, and Lenati are already having success with Highspot. Now that it is generally available, we can’t wait for you to try Highspot in your company and tell us what you think. Contact us if you would like help getting your teams set up.
Welcome to Highspot and better working knowledge.
