One part of my personal and professional background is a passion for games of all kinds, from chess to video games. I’ve participated in games and game communities both as a participant and, from the development side, a game company executive and producer.
In gaming of all types, users create content and share it with other users – it’s very commonplace. This ranges from records of games already played to actual content used in live games, such as maps, images, 3d objects and much more. This sharing is often highly automated or even automatic.
The power of this idea for business software has huge potential and nearly incalculable value, and is beginning to be explored by many companies, such as our partners at ConnectWise, whose users can now share several types of user-defined content.
Quosal has incorporated our idea very strongly into our application with our Content Library and Exchange, which allows our users to easily share content they’ve created with each other. This system has many great features and a graphical user interface that’s very easy to use.
That’s the easy part. Now we must convince users that it’s a good thing — in fact, it’s a GREAT thing — to take the time to share their content, such as quote forms, web designs, scripts and more.
In business, we’re not conditioned to do this. What we create in our business — report formats, forms, processes and so on — are Pentagon secrets, to be hoarded, guarded and never to appear outside of our four walls. I once believed this myself.
Phooey.
Our users create for themselves, or work with us to create, some terrific content. If a small fraction of our users shared that content with other users, we’d soon find that new users of Quosal would be able to find exactly what they need in that library. That continuing process would ensure that all users would be able to do the same, regardless of their industry or the type of content they’re interested in.
We feel this is an idea that is going to catch on very strongly, if not quickly. The value lies not just in the first and obvious application in our application space — the sharing of quote forms — but also in those new areas of business that our customers may not yet be participating in as yet. An example is a traditional VAR I spoke with, who is just now getting into managed services, that wanted to know how to put a good proposal process together. How great it will be when I can point him to the Content Exchange and say, “A lot of companies have been here before you — take a look at the plans in the Library.”
Contribute that great content you’ve created!
