From: ContacTree Ltd
ContacTree now has a US Patent for its collaboration processes in Outlook and SharePoint.
A US Patent has been granted to ContacTree Ltd., a registered Microsoft ISV Partner based in central England developing software tools and systems for collaboration in contact management and marketing. It covers processes for sharing and display of relationship and opportunity knowledge in team environments. ContacTree has been a first-mover in graphical display of hierarchic groups of client contacts – ‘the picture worth 1,000 words’.
ContacTree™ Personal for Outlook was first launched in 2002, providing the ability to visualise the relationships between key contacts within a client organisation.
The company is now looking for potential investors and licensees as partners to participate in the roll-out of their multi-user products based on the new patented technology. ContacTree Marketing Director and Co-founder David Davidson said “we have demonstrated, with a Government R&D award, the power of our relationship charting on conventional platforms. What we need now are the resources to help us to move forward into collaborative environments in CRM and ERP and Web 2.0, where this technology could be a big discriminator.”
“In a world of software where everyone is striving for competitive advantage, ContacTree has the only granted patent in this specialised field of graphical display of shared contact knowledge. While ContacTree products for Outlook have the ability to make a significant impact in a $100M market for Contact Management utilities, we believe that there is significantly greater potential, with the right partner, for this Patent to become a significant discriminator in the $30Bn market for CRM and ERP systems, especially in future Web 2.0 environments.”
“It is conventional, and convenient, for us to view and describe the people we know – or know about – as concrete contact entities. In reality what we generally know about them is the result of the relationship that we, or indeed others, have with them and therefore coloured by the constraints of that relationship. What we think we know about our ‘contact’ is therefore subjective, ephemeral, and based on our personal perspective of them. So it would be fair to assume that the more members of ‘our’ team who know a contact, the more complete and concrete our knowledge of that individual would be – provided that we could somehow share that information. In reality, what is often even more important to us is so much more than the cold curriculum vitae of that contact, it is the way in which that contact relates with us – or with our ‘opportunity'”.
Managing Director, Duncan McCreadie said “the processes that we have been developing provide a new level of sophistication in the way we capture and share knowledge about the contacts we all use in making our businesses successful. Our use of a Relationship Quality Value™ for each user to score the importance of the information in his folder really breaks new ground in collaboration, and opens up limitless possibilities. What we have also done is to make it extremely simple to record and manage this information. Conventional systems generally don’t work because they are too much trouble to use, and they don’t help to reveal the knowledge that you need.”
www.contactree.com
