Hands on Experience with Collaboration Tools

I started working at IntraLinks earlier this year and began my first day, as new employees generally do, by reading everything on the company intranet site, meeting with key team members and my manager to understand the goals and priorities for online marketing as well as key challenges for this year.

After the basics, it was time to dig in and get down to the dirty details of the what, where, when, and how about my responsibilities, in addition to learning about the products IntraLinks offers. What better way to do this then actually using the products we offer.

First thing I noticed was an IntraLinks Courier button on my MS Outlook as well as the ability to drag and drop documents when composing an email. Having read the product information on the website and intranet site, I knew of course that IntraLinks Courier enables the exchange of files from the desktop easily and securely, but to use it hands on was of course better then reading about it – especially coming from a company where we were limited to sending 2 MB files via email, which of course led to frustrations on how to exchange documents internally and externally.

I also received a userid and password for the IntraLinks Exchange. So expecting to find information relevant to for my role, I log into the IntraLinks Exchange. I also expected the software to be similar to collaboration software I have used in the past to exchange data internally and externally. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised for several reasons:

1. The user interface is clean and easy – I quickly knew all the Exchanges I had access to, the total number of documents in an exchange and who else had access.
2. There are clear filters to view new documents added since a particular date or just a list of all documents. Meta information for the documents includes the folder in which they are stored.
3. Access to the IntraLinks Designer, formerly known as Workspace Builder, with its intuitive interface to upload multiple documents by simply dragging and dropping, editing existing documents or removing documents depending on the permissions.
4. Placeholder documents can be created to ensure that all information will be accounted for and documents uploaded as they are prepared.

Having used various collaboration and document sharing tools in different types of organizations from insurance companies to banks to a television station, the IntraLinks products clearly stand out due to the high levels of security as well as a strong and intuitive user interaction. I am looking forward the continuing evolution of our solutions!