A little trivia for those interested in the genesis of Touchpoint...
In January 2003, I was finishing up some grad work at MIT focused on the management of emerging technologies. Through a series of events, I happened to connect with Open Text, and we kicked off a joint, six-month project focused on the "future of real-time collaboration."
Gathering both primary and secondary data (the work involved more than 130 companies across more than 30 industries), we sliced and diced to try and get a better "feel" for where the market was headed. The result? A hundred-page document describing the convergence of presence, instant messaging, web conferencing, and team workspaces.
Internally, our CTO turned the analysis into a proposal, rounded up a team of extremely talented folks, and secured management approval to move forward. (Despite the fact that I would be an obvious drag on the team, they invited me tag along as good luck.) We started coding in January 2004, and started using Touchpoint to build Touchpoint in March of the same year.
At Open Text, the Touchpoint Community grew over 2004 from our initial team of 4 to almost 600. And today, although the actual development team is still very small, the user community includes groups from every part of the company: sales, services, marketing, HR, and development.
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