Inmagic: Turning Up the Knob on Social Volume

With a name like lnmagic, it's not unusual for the company to pull a few surprises out of its proverbial hat.

For the past 25 years, lnmagic, Inc. concentrated on the special libraries/special collections niche, according to Mike Cassettari, vice president of marketing and business development.

As a software vendor, Inmagic built its reputation on tools such as Presto. But with an infusion of $5 million in funding from Edison Venture Fund, Inmagic took a new spin with its business base of 5,000 organizations in 100 countries as it set its sights on providing solutions and services for its users. The company also expanded its offerings with a new management team, new board of directors, new customer advisory board, a redesigned website, and a blog (http://blog.inmagic.com), designed as a resource for expert insight, opinion, and commentary for corporate information knowledge managers today.

Inmagic introduced its revamped strategic direction and new product lineup at SLA 2008 in Seattle to position the company in the social networking space. The latest version of the Presto software, which is due out this fall, leverages the company's knowledgebase with a new solution called Social Presto that is part of the new class of software described as a social knowledge network.

Social Presto is part social media, part enterprise knowledge repository designed to provide search, access, and discovery tools, while extending the reach of the previous versions of Presto currently used by clients including Newsweek, NASA, Cephalon, the Lincoln Center, and others. The company works closely with its customers to develop a tight integration between content and social tools-with the goal of enhancing the content, adding value, and driving content use. The newest version of Inmagic Presto will integrate social tools, such as tagging, ratings, discussions, collaboration, blogs, and wikis.

As social networks continue to infiltrate the enterprise arena, Presto "embraces the social media constructs," says Cassettari. It leverages vetted information (similar to Amazon's ratings and reviews from users), and manages documents, digital images, and articles, using the wisdom of the community (much like Wikipedia). "By combining the 'book smart' features of something like Factiva that offers organized, vetted information with the 'street smarts' from clients and core accounts, we can create the best of both worlds," says Phillip Green, Inmagic's CTO.

But one of the key differences with Presto is that collaboration in these social networks can be limited to more of a core group, says Green. Not every person can be afforded full access to every document, he says. Some knowledge managers carry different weights for adding commentary and ratings, which we refer to as the "social knowledge knob." For those companies that don't want all documents to have a fully accessible, Wikipedia-type input, they now have a bit more control over the process. Says Green, "Librarians are nervous about social media. It implies a lack of control." But by being able to manage the volume knob, a knowledge platform can be built with high veracity, he says. After all, we want to add value, he says. Presto is a way to share information, socialize, and build communities around content.

While information has often been tucked away in silos in the past, solutions such as Presto are opening the gateways to sharing information. According to Green, NASA is one example of an organization that used collaborative solutions to its advantage: to gather and share information about the corrupt tile problems on the shuttle. Testing and robotic safety checks during each launch (premission, liftoff, and postmission) allowed NASA engineers to watch the evolution of the process. Before the shuttle program is retired in 2010 and the launch team moves into other areas, the data from these shuttle missions has been preserved and the knowledge has been transferred and gathered from silos into a collective, collaborative repository for future use.

To round out the company's offerings, Inmagic also features a web-based integrated library system called Genie that provides back-office functions and a flexible information management system called DB/Text to manage a knowledge repository.

Inmagic's tools and solutions are designed for customers to get up and running quickly, says Green. It's more of a DIV solution that doesn't create a high dependence on lnmagic. "Our goal is to build a community around the content and let the socialization begin," he says.

-Barbara Brynko