Glip Takes The Learning Curve Out of Product Management

There are a number of platforms available to companies to aid in employee productivity, from complex Customer Relationship Management tools (CRMs) like Salesforce, to enterprise social networks like Yammer, and everything else in between.

Glip is different.  Glip announced today its real-time conversation platform for companies that makes it easy to collaborate between members of a team through drag and drop sharing of documents, assignment of tasks and syncing of schedules. It is so easy to use, you don’t even know you’re using it.  Document sharing, task management, and shared calendars melt in the background of your conversation without clogging up your inbox the way email does.  It’s what CRMs wish they were but without the learning curve the size of the Himalayas.

“We believe that this is a time when there’s a need for a new wave of collaboration that really addresses the fundamentals of why teams are successful,” said Claudio Pinkus, Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Glip.  “We wanted to create something new which we call a conversation platform that puts the conversation in the center of team performance, and all the work that needs to be done is in the conversation itself, available at all times.”

Unlike social networks such as Yammer and project-focused platforms such as Basecamp, Glip is a collaboration tool that utilizes communication, social, and document sharing applications directly within the conversation.  For example, if a team member wants to share a document with everyone, they simply drag and drop the document into the conversation box.  The document immediately gets shared with the group within the conversation feed and also stored on the right side of the screen, coined the “shelf” for later accessibility.  Scheduling meetings and other events is simply typed in the conversation box and then automatically synced with everyone’s calendar, eliminating the need to leave the program to send an email invite to everyone in the group.

Glip also has a very useful and comprehensive search function that not only allows you to find a document or other object you are searching for, but also see the conversation where it was mentioned or assigned.   It’s no surprise the search function is good, as founder Claudio Pinkus used to head up Ask Jeeves Business Solutions.  Also on the left side of the screen, objects are organized into Groups, Calendar, Tasks, Links and Files, so its simple to stay organized and recall previous assignments and documents.

“We wanted to keep everything simple,” said Peter Pezaris, Founder and CEO of Glip,  “We believe that we’ve created the most collaborative solution for teams and that addresses the most common complaint we get from teams- people just don’t want to learn to use another tool- with Glip you don’t have to, you can be productive right away and there’s essentially zero learning curve.”

Many companies shy away from adopting productivity or collaboration tools because the money and time to teach employees how to use it isn’t worth the cost.  The result is that employees rely on multiple programs and email threads to communicate, collaborate and schedule meetings.  This is not only time consuming, but also inefficient.

Glip is designed around its chat application, allowing users to communicate with one person, a group of people or the whole company within the conversation stream.  Glip currently utilizes the most common and essential apps that employees currently use on a regular basis including scheduling meetings, assigning tasks, sharing pages and links as well as creating, sharing and editing fully formatted documents.   Glip has also partnered with Zoom, a leading cloud video conferencing tool, to allow video chat and conferencing within the platform.  The company plans to add other plug-ins soon that will allow integration with Google and Dropbox as well as open the platform up to third party developers.

As far as price structure goes, the cost is relatively inexpensive compared with other productivity tools.  Glip is free for 60 days and then costs $5 per user per month or $50 per year.  Glip, which is available on desktop, will soon be rolling out on mobile devices as well (currently awaiting iOS approval) so all conversations, documents, tasks and schedules will be available via your mobile device.