FAQs About The Yakabox^TM

Q. What's a Yakabox™? 

A. The Yakabox™ is a secure knowledge-sharing appliance that incorporates four applications: collaboration, social  networking, content management and search. A nimble, robust alternative to traditional enterprise knowledge management systems, the Yakabox™ deploys in one-tenth the time, scales from a few dozen to tens of thousands of users with no downtime, and is so easy to navigate that users are productive immediately. 

Q. What's inside a Yakabox™?  

A. The Yakabox™ is delivered with four pre-installed,ready-to-use secure applications. Simply plug it in and go to work. Create user profiles, build teams, assign tasks, track projects and workflow, create blogs and microblogs, schedule events and send reminders, manage content, search for information, send messages, upload and download links, build your own custom applications (without waiting in line for the IT department), leave comments, conduct polls and more. 

The Yakabox™ accepts your structured and unstructured information of any type from virtually any source you permit, including assets from Microsoft Office and SharePoint®, shared drives, scanned ink-on-paper archives, electronic repositories...you name it. Since the Yakabox™ is user-centric rather than data-centric, it also captures the good stuff— ideas, opinions and lessons learned—that traditional systems don't recognize. 

Q. Is the Yakabox™ as secure as custom software?  

A. Yes. The Yakabox™ meets PL3 plus Annex E security requirements for software used by the U.S. Intelligence Community. It takes longer (and costs far more) to bring commercial off-the-shelf software into compliance for secure environments than it does to simply deploy the Yakabox™. 

Q. We already use internal wikis and enterprise search. Why do we need a Yakabox™?  

A. First, the Yakabox™ does more than connect your team to other people. It connects your team to what those other people know. Understanding the interconnections between people and content is a huge advantage when the information you need is probably in somebody's head.  

Second, most of the useful stuff in your organization is stuck in specific places: inboxes, file cabinets, web pages, calendars, email. Enterprise search is helpful if you know where something is, what it's called, or how it's categorized. But if you don't know any of those things—or you're not even aware that something exists—a search engine can't help. 

Here's an example. Let's say you need pricing information for a proposal. You search the corporate wiki, find recent estimates for three similar projects, and take it from there. You don’t know that two of those projects lost money and the third bid was so high the buyer walked away in a huff.

This doesn't happen with the Yakabox™. The system actually learns your preferences and delivers relevant material from multiple sources right to your desktop—including the stuff you don't even realize exists. There's gold buried in your legacy systems, online Web repositories, Office applications (including SharePoint) and wikis. The Yakabox™ knows it's there even when you don't. 

Q. Why deploy an appliance instead of installing software on our network?  

A. Start with security. Plugging a well-protected appliance into your network is safer by a long shot than embedding software right into the infrastructure. Yakabox™ multi-layered security includes encryption, two-factor authentication, and complete control over user profiles and permissions. You can set need-to-know restrictions for each content item by user, team or group.  In this protected ecosystem, configuration changes—updates, new applications, user additions and deletions—are non-events. On a corporate network, however, there is no such thing as a non-trivial change. Tweaking a single moving part can trigger security vulnerabilities system-wide.  

Second, appliances are supremely scalable. Viral adoption is the goal with knowledge sharing, and the sooner you push the limits of your first release, the more successful your initiative is. You have to scale fast when this happens, because momentum counts. An appliance-based system will literally expand from dozens of users to tens of thousands without a stutter. But you can't make big functional or capacity leaps on a traditional collaboration system without major infrastructure disruptions.  

Third, it's all about usability. With traditional knowledge sharing applications, there's an inverse relationship between robustness and usability. Yakabox™ architecture requires no such sacrifice, so team members use the same familiar interface when the system is fully implemented as they did on Day One. Since all collaboration components are integrated on a single platform, Yakabox™ users don't have to log in and out of multiple applications to get the day's work done.  

Q. How can we maintain a knowledge sharing system without IT Resources?

A. You don't need them. The Yakabox™ is built for maximum user autonomy (within your corporate security policies). Reducing IT dependence is fundamental to successful knowledge-sharing. The Yakabox™ gives you one point of accountability, eliminating finger-pointing among hardware vendors, software vendors and integrators when diagnostics, repairs and modifications are necessary. On a day-to-day basis, driving knowledge sharing activity through the Yakabox™ frees up both your corporate network and the people who maintain it.  

Q. We don't want to install an appliance. What are the alternatives?  

A. The Yakabox™ is available in three delivery modes: 1.) as an appliance installed behind your firewall, 2.) hosted by Yakabod and 3.) as a managed service, (bundled hardware and software installed at your site on a subscription basis). In every configuration, security is ironclad and no per-user fees apply.  

Q. How long does it take to roll out the Yakabox™?  

A. About a tenth of the time it takes to deploy a traditional knowledge sharing system. We install your Yakabox™, build a short-term roadmap to address your immediate opportunities, and get your core team up and running within the first 30 days. You can expect your first custom application in three to four weeks. Your users and stakeholders drive the requirements throughout this process and have frequent opportunities to reprioritize. If business conditions change, your Yakabox^_TM changes right along with them.

Q. Why is the Yakabox™so much faster to implement?  

A. You get a working knowledge sharing system right out of the box, which is an immediate advantage, and Yakabod builds your customizations according to Agile Development principles. Agile Development is an iterative approach that chunks requirements planning and programming into a series of closely spaced deliverables, reducing cycle time from months (or years) to weeks.In contrast, traditional development lumps requirements planning for the first five years into an up-front exercise. Coding starts after the guesswork is complete. This is a grossly inefficient way to produce software. Twenty-five percent of those requirements change before the project ends, and half the features produced in the early stages are never used at all.  

Q. Why can't we just use SharePoint^®? 

A. You can. In fact, many Yakabod clients launched workgroup collaboration with SharePoint, ran into snags when they were ready to scale, and upgraded to the Yakabox™ for enterprise-wide deployment. The Yakabox™ integrates with SharePoint ®, client-side applications like Microsoft Office, and legacy systems.  

Q. We're taking knowledge-sharing one step at a time. Why start with four applications?  

A. The acquisition and lifetime ownership cost for fully integrated knowledge sharing on the Yakabox™ is usually  much lower than the cost of licensing, customizing, implementing and training for a single application. It's that efficient. From a planning standpoint, the odds are good that you'll want expand enterprise collaboration within 12-18 months of rolling out your first application. With the Yakabox™, you can take it a step at a time and implement additional features and functions whenever you're ready.  

Q. We've tried collaboration systems with no success. What's different about the Yakabox™?  

A. The number-one cause of knowledge sharing failure is cultural resistance. If users don't want to (or can't) use the software, there's no way to make them comply. Regardless, traditional enterprise systems are designed with one thing in common: technology first, user experience second.  

The Yakabox™ is built the other way around. This is intuitive social software engineered for serious work. Users are productive the first time they log on, a prerequisite for viral adoption. Yakabod clients who've burned through as many as five solutions before implementing the Yakabox™typically reach critical mass in six months or less. 

Q. What are the Yakabox™ pricing and delivery options?  

A. You have three choices: 1.) install the system behind your firewall with a traditional software license, 2.) install the system behind your firewall on a managed service basis (which requires no capital expense), or 3.) as a hosted service.