Tech Company Transforms Digital Content Management Services

ActiveWrite, a Columbus-based tech company, is giving digital content management control back to businesses. The innovative software service and platform, which is based on the company’s namesake, is like Microsoft Word Online or Google Docs, but allows users to dive deeper into content permissions, data retrieval and data storage.

In 2014, ActiveWrite CEO and cofounder Vernon Kennedy decided to work for himself after years in sales and business development. He and a partner bought controlling interest in a technical writing, e-learning company that had top-tier clients, including Bloomberg and Hewlett-Packard. The process was very manual, he says. The client would send them content, then they work on it and send it back.

“Like in every industry, we were trying to do more with less,” says Kennedy. “Here’s all this back and forth between us and the client and the meter is running.”

Kennedy wanted an answer to the problems his clients were having in content generation, collaboration and accessibility. “When you lose a key employee, your organization regresses. It slows down. It no longer benefits from the former employee’s contributions,” says Kennedy. “You take your knowledge with you when you leave. Everything that he/she did is still there on their servers: every file, every document. Organizations don’t know what’s there: They can’t reuse it. The majority of information has no value unless it’s searchable or if it can be manipulated.” One example of a client problem was Bloomberg, who told Kennedy’s company that they needed access to its enterprise data, which is any unstructured data that could be in a text, document or email.

Around early 2015, Kennedy called his long-time friend Codrington, who also has experience in e-learning. Then they called Rajani Koneru, president and CEO of DW Practice, an IT services provider based in Atlanta. With more than 20 years experience in the tech industry, Koneru came on board as ActiveWrite’s co-founder and chief technology officer. Then in January 2016, Kennedy, having sold his interest in his company, began work solely on ActiveWrite. Now the team could focus their efforts on reimagining the industry’s approach to content, data, access and collaboration.

So, what does ActiveWrite do? Kennedy says, “We provide tools for organizations to convert unstructured data into enterprise knowledge by fundamentally changing the way they create, share, reuse and store content. We facilitate this change in behavior in a way that is virtually seamless to the end user and the ease of use is what drives adoptability. Most technology in the market today addresses only symptoms or parts of the challenges our clients face.” It’s time for a change, and “the paradigm hasn’t changed since we’ve become digital ... not since 1958,” says David Codrington, ActiveWrite co-founder and chief systems  architect. “Content is trapped.”

ActiveWrite frees the content from files, Codrington says. It gives users at organizations granular control. “Traditionally, when you edit a doc, and you have more than eight users, the system slows down drastically but you still can check in and out,” he says.

But with ActiveWrite, users don’t have to check out. Owners of the document can control access from the document level all the way down to the word level.

“You’re controlling access to the content, and the content is infinitely changeable,” says Codrington, who also still works as a SharePoint engineer for Microsoft. “Use your imagination – whatever you think of, you can do.”

Codrington says that if a co-worker goes into a document that you recently edited, their new edits would go to the top. It is sort of like working in

Adobe Photoshop where all the edits are layered on top of each other. With ActiveWrite, the trail of edits is also saved, and you can still use the previous versions.

“It challenges everyone who uses files: PowerPoint, spreadsheets, not just Word documents. It’s a brand new platform,” Codrington says.

In ActiveWrite, each sentence, paragraph, heading or inserted media file becomes its own object. And because everything is an object, everything is searchable.

ActiveWrite’s primary focus is to make it easier for clients to complete their daily tasks and to limit the amount of research and rework necessary for future projects. “We’ve done away with versioning,” says Kennedy. “Because we break it down as individual objects, it allows us to develop a contextual understanding of why things changed. It’s a change management system.”

When organizations work on documents, there could be 10 files that are 90 percent the same and you don’t remember what file you’re working on, Kennedy explains. ActiveWrite saves the delta, the incremental change, not the same document over and over again.

“I had a senior VP [at a bank] tell me that she spent 3 1/2 hours editing the wrong version of a document,” he says. “What is her time worth? Probably a significant amount, especially when you realize it isn’t just an isolated instance. But we’ve all done that.” 

When Codrington started working on ActiveWrite, he realized the only way to accomplish what they wanted was to have full tracking capabilities, with each object having its own timeline. 

“It behaves like a document, but everything is dependent and co-dependent,” says Codrington. “If you edited it 100 times, you can go back to each moment. This allows you to go back and see what you did. You can walk away for months and it’s still all there. [It’s] your ideas as they evolve.”

ActiveWrite, a 2017 Gartner Cool Vendor in Content Services, is also format agnostic, which means you can use it with your PC or Mac. And it saves server storage space. Since there aren’t multiple versions of one file, 100 megabytes doesn’t become 1,000 megabytes, says Kennedy.

Users also can set up parent-child relationships between objects, which benefits companies that have to adhere to regulatory guidelines, such as insurance companies and banks. If policy language is changed in one document, ActiveWrite automatically updates the language in the linked documents. 

Another huge benefit to ActiveWrite is data security. “Viruses pass from file structure to file structure, and that’s how they corrupt content,” says Kennedy. “Because we strip away the file structure, and we sort the data as objects in databases, all of your content is now virtually impervious to viruses.” 

ActiveWrite is constantly evolving and enhancing its usability. In the future, Kennedy wants ActiveWrite to have translation capabilities with localization, which would include cadence and dialect. 

ActiveWrite filed for permanent patents in January 2017 and now are playing the waiting game. “What’s kind of crazy when we started writing the patent, we discovered no one had ever patented this process,” Codrington says.

The inability of organizations to fully leverage their enterprise content will directly and increasingly impact their ability to manage costs, achieve compliance and compete successfully. Put simply, ActiveWrite provides the tools to help organizations, large and small, do just that. 

ActiveWrite is located in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, call 614.309.1575 or visit www.activewrite.com.