Emgage
A Collaborative and Flexible Digital Work Platform

Although Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 are significant IT assets for many organizations, workflow problems and ease of use issues continue to plague businesses and organizations of all sizes. In response, Emgage has developed two products, Prime and Turbo Builder that combine together to form a comprehensive digital work platform.

“Emgage started off as a consulting company working with hundreds of customers large and small only to realize that the problems that knowledge workers face are fairly consistent across any organization,” says Harout Katerjian, CEO, Emgage. This realization resulted in the creation of a solution-centric, work platform that sits on top of SharePoint.

We want the knowledge worker to solve their own problem quickly because that makes the process more agile

“We’ve developed our technology by figuratively putting ourselves in the seats and at the desks of the knowledge worker, exploring the problems and the road blocks that they run into on a daily basis as they endeavor to do their work. Our goal, is to put extremely flexible, agile technology into the knowledge worker’s hands so that they can quickly solve their own work problems, reducing the strain on the IT Department and dramatically increasing overall productivity. If it won’t make your business significantly better then we won’t include it as a feature on our platform,” says Geoff Talbot, Director of Marketing.

Emgage’s Prime product allows organizations to create an intranet or collaboration platform that deploys within two hours and is functional within a day. Working on any version of SharePoint (from Foundation 2010 to Office 365), it’s a no code, non-templated solution with a drag-and-drop interface that any user with basic computer skills can use.

To understand how both Prime and Turbo Builder work together, Talbot says, “For our clients, Prime creates the digital workspace that they have been looking for and Turbo Builder is a primary tool that enables them to solve their own work problems within that space.” Turbo Builder allows users to create their own rich forms and applications quickly and easily without writing a single line of code or having to send off a request to an overwhelmed IT Department.

An example of how both Prime and Turbo are being successfully used together is best illustrated by the manner in which Departments of Education are using Emgage to satisfy the requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Prime is being used to build the dashboards that connect relevant parties to the data, and to present it in an engaging and comprehensive manner. Turbo Builder communicates with Prime to collect and evaluate the data, allowing for accurate assessment and reporting in real time.

On rare occasions when a customer encounters a new work problem that the current Emgage technology cannot solve, the company will build the solution into the product at a reduced cost to the client, in alignment with their co-development model. “We know if a particular client is having a problem, most likely others within a similar vertical are experiencing similar challenges too,” says Talbot. “We partner with our customers, in this instance, to develop the product so that it answers their needs. They are as much a part of our business as we are.”

As for what the company has in store for the future, Katerjian says “the plan is to continue to lower the barriers for everyday businesses. We are investing heavily into our digital work platform and making it easier for smaller organizations to sign up.” Emgage is also working on Emgage Exchange, a collaborative digital work platform that app creators can monetize. “People in regular America can participate in this technological revolution to help a lot of people,” concludes Katerjian.