CMS Weekly

KnowledgeTree Takes Root in New ECM Markets
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

LinuxInsider reports that the world of turnkey electronic content management has few open source players, which helps a company like KnowledgeTree stand out. The ECM software category caters to a wide variety of industries, and each has its own complex set of requirements.

On CMS Weekly we usually talk about content management as web content. For this story, consider the broader application of electronic document management. In this arena, in contrast to the web content management, there are few open source players. One worthy of note is KnowledgeTree.

KnowledgeTree was founded in 2004 by CEO Daniel Chalef in response to a request from a government agency in his home country of South Africa to help set up a system for managing its documents and tracking access. Chalef was already hatching plans to develop an open source product for document management, so he chose to continue with that model, initially developing a community-based free version, and proceeding to a commercial version, available stand-alone or web-based.

KnowledgeTree was designed to be easy to install and use, and includes a Microsoft Office add-on, for accessing and editing documents in the KnowledgeTree repository directly in Office. KnowledgeTree Live includes an integrated Zoho Writer for document editing without additional editing software. In addition to more than 300 commercial subscribers, the community edition has been downloaded 650,000 times. More than 60% of the subscribers are based in the US. The target customer is small to medium sized companies and government agencies.

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