Kindling Revamps User Interface, Offers SharePoint, Office Integration

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) May 4, 2010

Kindling Revamps User Interface, Offers SharePoint, Office Integration Kindling (news, site) is focused on making innovation management simple and the company who created it — Arc90, Inc. — has made a number of changes to their SaaS-based solution to do just that.

A Spanking New User Interface

A chat with Tim Meaney, Partner, Arc90 and Product Manager, Kindling filled us in on all the new things changing in the Kindling Innovation Management Solution.

The overall premise of offering a simple user experience that let's the user focus on the task at hand hasn't changed, but it has improved:

Kindling's New User Interface

Meaney told us that this is a significant redesign of the the application — it took them six weeks to redesign the UI. This new interface streamlines content and makes room for new capabilities.

The goal was to enable the content — the ideas and discussion — to stand forward and not have the software overwhelm the experience.

To Go With Some Spanking New Functionality

To go along with this new interface, comes some new functionality:

Public and Internal Discussion: Now you have both public and private discussions around an idea. Internal discussion may be necessary by management to discuss topics such as ROI. Discussions are formatted in a wiki style, something many users will find easy to get a handle on.
Approval Workflow on Internal Discussions: Users can now edit other user's ideas. The change however, must be approved by the original creator of the idea. There's even a revision history, so you know who made what changes.
Reputation System: A new reputation management system let's users win points by actively engaging in Kindling. Ways to earn points include: get an idea approved, participate in an implementation, get an idea assigned. There's a leader board to show who has the most reputation points. Of course this functionality isn't for everyone and you can turn it off.

There's a pattern for what gets people motivated to participate says Meaney and Kindling offers things to do just that:

Reputation
Email Digests
Mobile Access
Campaigns

A Mobile Version

And speaking of mobile access, Kindling now offers a mobile optimized version for those on the go:

Access Kindling via your Smartphone

Note that there are no mobile applications, but rather an optimized version of the Kindling website for any phone that has a browser.

A Little SharePoint Integration

Also new is integration with SharePoint — 2007 and 2010. Integration includes centralized authorization and single sign on with SharePoint, and a few webparts for viewing Kindling content and search integration.

Kindling/SharePoint integration

The key here right now is that this is a view only of Kindling content within SharePoint. Something Meaney told us will change. Right now though it was important to bring Kindling and ideas closer to people. More engaged users will interact natively with Kindling (clicking an idea in SharePoint will open Kindling in a new browser window). The next phase of integration will benefit the casual user.