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Friday, August 3, 2012

Generic vs. Specialized Document Sharing in the Cloud

There has been a lot of buzz around the new entrant into the cloud-based document sharing space with the recent announcement of Google Drive. But not all cloud-based document sharing is the same. Specialized document sharing solutions address a fundamentally different set of business problems than a generic document sharing solution does.  So where do generic document sharing solutions end and specialized document sharing solutions begin?

Generic vs. Specialized?

Generic document sharing solutions started out to address personal file storage in the cloud.  By allowing individuals to put their personal pictures, videos and also documents in the cloud, they would be accessible from anywhere.  With the recent consumerization of IT, businesses quickly found that their employees were using personal solutions as business productivity tools – like sharing business documents with themselves.  Many generic document sharing solutions saw this as an opportunity to enter into the Enterprise Content Sharing space as a way of further monetizing their applications. But much of the functionality and infrastructure is geared towards document accessibility for lots and lots of documents and fails to deliver deeper business process-specific value.
This is where Specialized document sharing comes in. Specialized document sharing providers focus on solving business process specific problems such as how to run due diligence more effectively, gain control and visibility over governance and compliance processes in your organization or improve litigation support. Everything they invest in, from the features in their product to the people in their business, have this domain-specific knowledge.

If you take Firmex as an example, our products and services are geared around helping companies more effectively and successfully run financial transactions. Our Virtual Data Room and our Client Services team support thousands of deals a year. We specialize in being the best data room provider in the market.

With that said, we recently released an infographic using the launch of Google Drive as a means to illustrate the differences between generic and specialized document sharing offerings. We hope you'll find the information to be of value. It is available for viewing and download below.

If you'd like to learn more about how Firmex can support your specific business processes click here or click their contact us link.


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