Bringing Enterprise grade Document Management to Salesforce: ContributeCloud.com

“At ContributeCloud.com, It’s nice to be native!”

Salesforce can radically change the way an organization runs their Sales, Marketing & Customer Service division by transitioning users to a smarter, more efficient, data-driven platform that leverages best practices by streamlining customer communications. However, many businesses fail to leverage the full range of capabilities available to them- particularly the numerous services and applications which help unify Sales, Marketing & Customer Service groups with the rest of the enterprise. Leveraging these additional capabilities can be a simple task of configuration, while others require development experience. Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace makes it easy to purchase add-ons which are tested for security, parity and viability before they can be publicly listed. They can extend existing Salesforce functionality or add a completely new set of capabilities.

While there are thousands of apps that supplement the platform’s capabilities, Air cDMS™ by ContributeCloud.com is the only one that adds Enterprise Document Management suitable for the entire enterprise in a single package which runs completely native to Salesforce.com, keeping your documents secure and in one place.

ContributeCloud was formed after partners John McKenney & Kris Taylor realized the strong need to enhance one of the platform’s biggest weaknesses –Salesforce Files & Attachments. They realized bringing an Enterprise Document Management app to the platform would enable organizations to expand their usage of Salesforce to the rest of the organization. As they embarked on design and spoke with clients, they quickly realized their innovative approach to Enterprise Document Management was more than a simple Salesforce “add-on;” it solved deeply entrenched issues found within the forty-billion dollar Document Management Systems industry itself – a space plagued by years of complacency, enormous cost, and complexity to manage.

“Salesforce is our DNA” is ContributeCloud’s slogan and self-identity. When a company has over 40 years of combined Salesforce experience among its employees – many of whom have a diverse portfolio of designing, customizing, implementing and supporting Salesforce – it’s easy to see why. Several members have been recognized for their innovative work over the years by being selected as Dreamforce panelists on topics such as “App Cloud Innovation, Platform Encryption and Building Next Generation Applications in the Cloud.” As active Platform Customer Advisory Board “CAB” members, their contribution and learning has been influential for the company to generate a wider audience across the globe.

In conversation with CEO, Kris Taylor and CTO, John McKenney

How successful was your first project roll on?

Kris: We learned many lessons early in our development cycle as ISV Partners, which is a completely different landscape and development cycle compared to a Customer Developer. We had a few setbacks, but our “fail fast” mentality ensured the loss was no greater than few days. Ultimately our patience and dedication to developing software that was completely native to our host platform paid off, and we released our app to the Salesforce AppExchange to high praise. Our first release contains features that were not planned for one or two releases, which shows just how far we were able to come in such a short development timeframe.

What were the grounds on which you have expanded your company and its offerings over the years?

Kris: We started ContributeCloud.com (“CCCom”) with the focus to bring about a culture that is more family oriented and allows our team to meet their highest abilities. CCCom brings our lightweight, but enterprise feature-heavy solution to the trusted SF customer base to continue to polish our product and generate new customer base in markets that they have struggled in or lost to competition.

What learning’s helped you to set this company up?

Kris: Past successes and failures! John and I worked side by side as IT Directors for a large company that desired a radical change to their development innovation and cycle. We were so wildly successfully that the company decided to retreat back into their old ways because the innovation and culture change was happening at a rate they never imagined. John and I had an instant bond, and our blood lines are both heavily Scottish; which makes us very direct and fearless. We decided to leave and build a company whose culture is based on the spirit of innovation, exploration and openness we started as peers. I learned to put my trust in a partner and shed the typical corporate cloak; we removed politics from the day, so we could be more productive and focus on specific well-defined meetings – all to maximize efficiency.

Do you have any new products ready to be/getting ready to be rolled out into the market?

John: We formed this company with a highly focused mission and multi-year product roadmap. After our first release, and during our first Salesforce Security Review (the process of being vetted for security and quality), we immediately moved onto the next phase of our roadmap. Our next full release(s) contains huge leaps forward of our core, as well as a new web-based client that supports Salesforce’s newest UI “Lightning Experience” with multi-tasking, server-side document viewing features and more. By the end of 2017 we will have a Document Management System in Salesforce capable of rivaling some of the ECM’s industry’s Leaders.

Rolling out future endeavors

As a company sticking to its goals and culture, ContributeCloud aspires to grow under its term and market demand. In course of time, products will evolve from a Salesforce-only solution to supporting the broader user base of an enterprise; the company will also continue its dedication towards Salesforce’s platform, planning to evolve by leveraging the Heroku cloud. “We expect to be ‘in the conversation’ or possibly recognized as visionaries, challengers or as the holy grail ‘leaders’ of the Enterprise Document Management industry- recognized by industry giants Gartner and Forrester,” sums up Kris Taylor.

Meet the Masterminds

Kris Taylor, the co-founder and CEO of ContributeCloud has been a senior leader in the Information Technology Industry for the last 16 years. His reputation for leadership and team building has been recognized around the U.S. and internationally as well. As an accomplished entrepreneur, investor, executive, consultant and business owner, Kris has accomplished momentous success by delivering projects from idea to delivery, in which there was high complexity or project budgets upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars, spanning many different industries, all of which have become a grand success.

John McKenney, the co-founder and CTO of ContributeCloud has been recognized as one of the foremost experts in the unstructured content market for over 15 years now. He is an Information Technology veteran with hands-on experience in full scale and complex enterprise deployments with Gartner & Forrester leading Document and Content Management (“ECM”), Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) and Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”). To this day, many of his enterprise deployments continue to leverage the integrations, add-ons and innovations he introduced so many years back.

“Our mission is to design and develop Salesforce.com applications that integrate seamlessly with the platform, enhancing your experience and broadening your capabilities.”