OutStart Participate

OutStart Participate is an enterprise social software platform that enables organizations to leverage the formal and informal knowledge that exists within the enterprise. Studies show that an organization’s knowledge workers, including employees, customers, and partners, attain 80% of their new knowledge informally. Participate enables knowledge workers to share and organically capture informal knowledge for re-use. The result is a dramatic increase in the flow of information and expertise providing workers with the right information at the right time to support the right business actions. Participate can be readily integrated with learning systems, including OutStart’s, to bridge and extend formal and informal learning initiatives.

With OutStart Participate, you can:

• Readily connect to organization expertise. At best, only 20% of knowledge is ever documented, and new knowledge is in constant demand. Participate automatically identifies experts capable of answering questions, and through workflow, insures that answers are provided in a timely fashion.
• Leverage common tools to insure high use. Use of common tools such as email and PDAs insure that questions can be readily asked and answered without special effort.
• Build knowledge base organically. One of the common challenges of knowledge initiatives is getting people to share knowledge. By using common tools such as MicroSoft® Office and email, knowledge is shared as easily as responding to an email. All answers are then organically captured and categorized for ongoing use.
• Dramatically cut the time for knowledge development. Build the knowledge bank organically with knowledge captured directly from desktop applications and transcripts of discussions with experts and communities.
• Connect all social software forms. Web 2.0 technologies including wikis, blogs and communities all provide excellent venues for knowledge capture and sharing. But standalone they also create additional silos of knowledge. Participate uses and ties together all these technologies so that knowledge shared, regardless of venue, is captured, categorized and readily accessible.
• Reduce total cost of ownership. Meet budget, resource and business objectives with a choice of on-premise or hosted implementation. Leverage OutStart management services and community-building expertise to successfully launch and grow vibrant self-service and support communities in less than 3 weeks.

Key Features

Automatically captured expert and community discussion threads, plug-ins for common desktop tools such as Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer, a document library to import existing documents and connectors that provide real-time access to enterprise content quickly produce a comprehensive knowledge bank.

• Flexible, user-friendly administration tools facilitate fast configuration of business rules and workflows to manage knowledge, experts and communities without programming.
• Natural language search, guided search, and search by area of interest or related concepts increase customer success with self-service.
• Multi-lingual support including English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, French, Spanish and Italian offers native-language self-service.
• Real-time access to experts and communities lets users inside and outside the organization post inquiries and be part of a discussion.
• Enterprise-grade security manages responses during community discussions, such as answering internally only, externally only, or both.