At the beginning of my career, and until not so long ago, I worked with well known companies in the IT industry - in the sense, even my non-IT friends and relatives recognized their names. Then, in 2005, I ended up in Interwoven. Since then, when I answer the frequently asked question, where do you work, my reply -- Interwoven -- often elicits a brief oh, followed by an embarrassing silence. I then proceed to explain that Interwoven makes enterprise content management products, and is currently focused on developing an online marketing platform. Hopefully this blog entry becomes a place I can point people to, so that I need to repeat myself less and less over time.

The gradual and increasing dependence of most organizations on electronic documents of some sort over time is one of those things like the air we breathe, that happens, but we take for granted. Over time, the ability to manage these electronic documents becomes the differentiator for these organizations. A large part of the knowledge of the organization is increasingly in electronic documents. This drives the need to find them at the right time, circulate them to the right people when created or changed, preserve them when used in a business context for auditing purposes, etc. Interwoven basically sells products that makes this easy for our customers.

There are broadly two major types of document management capabilities that dominate our business -- web content management and collaborative document management. Web content management is about getting the website for your company correct, up to date, and available in all versions past and present. Collaborative document management is about managing the various presentations, spreadsheets, reports and other documents used in day to day business.

The other products available from us are related to capabilities possibly required by both major lines of business, including the ability to manage large scale deployment of content across to multiple servers in an organization, manage digital assets, keep electronic records of documents, extract and manage metadata etc. Of course, you should go to the web site for details, but I hope this small explanation gets you started on understanding what Interwoven does.