"Managing multiple design documents was a nightmare," says Shashank Deshpande, Founder and President, Clarice Technologies. Deshpande claims there was no single control point or single application that touches this data - all scattered across several machines, disks and directories with varied file sizes. But this tough going for Clarice ended with the integration of Uhuroo services. Now being happy with the result of the Uhuroo services, Deshpande comments, "Now, we have single source for all customer documents with comments from various stakeholders." Besides being an aid to Clarice, Uhuroo online service has also helped several companies in different verticals to streamline critical customer document management. It plays a different ball game in serving mainly the smaller medium size companies rather than mostly the mature market.

Working on the Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, Uhuroo allows businesses to easily exchange content internally as well as, with their clients and partners. It is a lightweight, user-focused content management system designed to be a solution for end users overwhelmed with content in email, folders or corporate LANs (Local Area Networks), who need a better solution to share content with their employees, partners, customers and other collaborators. Incubated in IIT Mumbai, Uhuroo the flagship product of CollCraft Technologies is founded by Kaushal Sarda, Madan Rawtani and Dr. N.L.Sarda in 2006. The opportunity for getting started with Uhuroo arose, when Kaushal and his team realized that there was a dire need to strike a balance in managing the herculean task of handling a project which encompasses a lot of research work and content collaboration. They observed that during the implementation of the project, the clients were dealing with incompatible systems and information was scattered at different locations. Gathering information from all these systems was a cumbersome process. This made the team go back and sketch out an advanced online information sharing platform.

Being a web based application, users can instantly create centralized groups for their teams to exchange content, share files, web-pages, and critical messages in a flash. According to the company, business professionals can now not only capture content and the discussions generated around it, but also tag the content and control who accesses it. "Currently, we have about 1300 teams or small companies worldwide using Uhuroo for free within two months of launching the application," says Kaushal, Co-Founder and CEO, CollCraft Technologies. A few of its customers include Capgemini, Mool Content Solutions, Arch Pharma, Endice Consulting, Guru & Jana Chartered Accountants and many more. Till contents of a customer's Uhuroo account do not exceed 1 GB, it is a no charge (free) account. If and when the size exceeds 1 GB, a customer needs to convert to a paid account and pay Rs.250 per user per month as a subscription fee. What differentiates Uhuroo in the market is that it is very simple to setup and use for the business users. An user does not take more than one minute to make an account get started with Uhuroo. It provides a hassle free way for the users to find any content using full body search within documents and discover popular content through the dashboard interface.

Also, Uhuroo asserts its prominence including a couple of features which comprise Plugins for information collection (example - outlook plugin/browser plugin), Smart Tags to organize the content in a better way, Group Management to enable information sharing and Content Aggregator for information consolidation and codification. As a part of its strategy for the growth of the product, Uhuroo schedules to integrate other applications to support specialized content collaboration features. Some of integrations to be provided include Echosign, EditGrid, Efax, iPaper, Zoho/Google docs, Seclore. Also, an Uhuroo folder will be created on the desktop through which users can push content to Uhuroo and which will further sync and maintain the content on the user's machine for easy offline access.

Betting high on the market, Uhuroo has been identified as a key contender in the Enterprise 2.0 space by IDC in their report on the Asia/Pacific Digital Marketplace. Gartner Group and IDC estimate that the enterprise content management and collaboration markets are at $2.2 billion and growing at 10 percent and 17 percent respectively. The market is dominated by expensive ($1500 per license) solutions targeting niche usage. Having the cohesive strategy for content management, Uhuroo is going after the 82 percent of users with no current solution other than emails and networked shared folders, at a disruptive price point. Also, the service raised investment from Seedfund a premier Indian early stage venture capital firm in 2008.

However, establishing a convincing position in the market with such a robust application to help consumers is not an easy task. What accentuates the challenge for Uhuroo is that it is still a perception of people’s mind about how secure is it to have data available and sent through network server, besides India being a latent market for hosted application. But, Kaushal and his team managed to win over its consumers by engineering the products in a manner which is far more responsible and empathetic towards their consumers. Uhuroo is Content collaboration service (and a lot more) meant for all business users and takes collaboration to the next logical level where participants' responses do not remain fragmented but get consolidated for further analysis and classification.