Boardwalktech Releases Cell-Level Excel Data Management Solution for SharePoint 2010
Palo Alto, California – May 4, 2011
Boardwalktech, Inc., a leader in collaboration technology for the enterprise, announced today that it has integrated the patented, cell-level collaboration capabilities of the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) with Microsoft SharePoint 2010. With this combination, companies are finally able to overcome a number of all-too-common obstacles related to using SharePoint for Excel-based collaborative processes.
“Today, working with Excel through SharePoint is done primarily at the file level and faces a number of hurdles. For example, two or more users can’t work on a file simultaneously on their desktops due to the check in/check out requirement in SharePoint. In the online case, hosted Excel cannot match Excel’s local computation capabilities and merging and tracking changes is cumbersome. As a result, users tend to create their own working copy of the file increasing versions and associated storage space to support them. This in turn frustrates IT since one of the major deployment goals for SharePoint is to control files and versions. In addition, SharePoint lacks row and column access control, so users are required to create multiple copies of the shared file and aggregate the data manually. This makes anything but the simplest process too complex to manage. Finally, SharePoint lacks a scalable cell-level change history— users can only look at versions of the entire Excel file. This means seeing and comparing what’s changed at the cell level is very difficult if not impossible.
BCP overcomes all of these limitations with its patented positional database technology which extends SharePoint’s file-level collaboration capabilities to include powerful cell-level capabilities. Using BCP and SharePoint together, multiple users can work on the same Excel data at the same time (even while offline), eliminating the check in/check out and version proliferation problems. You can also set row and column-level permissions, so users see only the data they are entitled to see and act on, with the consolidation of all user input handled automatically by BCP. In addition, all changes are versioned in BCP’s patented positional database, which provides a cell-level audit trail of every change ever made. The combined capabilities of the two platforms increases the value of SharePoint to the user community by providing an enterprise quality means to collaborate using Excel and, with BCP’s cell-level data integration capabilities, to tie those collaborative planning applications to ERP and other edge applications.
“Users have been looking for an alternative to emailing spreadsheets around to support collaboration and yet they’ve been frustrated by the lack of cell-level collaboration capabilities with standalone SharePoint,” comments JB Kuppe, VP of Marketing at Boardwalktech. “With BCP and SharePoint, our customers can now deploy an enterprise platform which brings powerful collaboration capabilities to the most widely used business process environment—Excel.”
About the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP):
Using the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP), line of business (LOB) users can work offline in a familiar spreadsheet environment performing what-ifs to mature their inputs. When they are ready, with the click of a button, their changes are shared at the cell-level and automatically consolidated between other process users working in Excel and with backend systems. Unlike with traditional database technology connected to Excel, all changes in BCP are versioned and persist which means your changes are not overwritten. BCP’s capabilities as a business process automation solution have provided measurable operational improvements and financial ROI for companies ranging in size from $20m to over $22B including Coca-Cola, Qualcomm, and Logitech who have enterprise enabled their Excel-based processes using BCP.
About Boardwalktech:
Boardwalktech enables companies to build and maintain competitive advantage through business process innovation in the enterprise collaborative planning space. Boardwalktech provides a patented, next-generation positional database technology platform that enables companies to integrate and automate collaborative processes using spreadsheets as the user interface form and the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) as the data management environment.
Learn more at www.boardwalktech.com
Company Contact
J.B. Kuppe
650-618-6104
jb.kuppe@boardwalktech.com
Released May 4, 2011