Enterprise Tablets, iPresent Content Organization

Enterprise tablet usage is still in its infancy. With customer presentations as one of the main out-of-the-box applications for tablets, businesses are finding they need an organized way to manage and distribute information to the sales force and for training purposes.

“In 2012, lots of big companies bought tablets,” said iPresent founder and CEO Phil Lenton. “In 2013, they aren’t being used too much. Giving out iPads without the right tools doesn’t do a lot of good.”

Founded and spun out of U.K.-based Compsoft, iPresent emerged out of iPad app-building work done by the parent for large corporations such as Symantec. Lenton said the iPresent application, currently on the Apple iPad with versions for Android, iPhone and Windows 8 scheduled for a summer release, has taken on a life of its own, with large corporations and smaller businesses signing up for the service.

The app provides a content management system for delivering information to tablets along with the ability to customize the look and feel of a tablet presentation above and beyond simply flipping through a Microsoft PowerPoint slide deck. Multiple types of files including video, the aforementioned PowerPoint, HTML 5 Web pages and graphics can be put together to create a catalog-style presentation, enabling a user to smoothly tap into information. 

“We’re more than just a push version of Dropbox,” Lenton said.

The iPresent app is bring brought into larger businesses not by the IT staff, but the marketing guy, according to Lenton.

“We’ll have one user sign up for a 30-day free trial,” he said. “Then he can go with the standard or pro version at $20 to $30 per user per month. It typically takes six to nine months for the enterprise to buy in once people start seeing it.”

iPresent provides a content distribution platform for information, enabling marketing to deliver a smoothly polished set of the latest information directly to a mobile device. The app collects “open” information on files and can be allowed to take feedback in the form of user comments or a simple five-star rating system, so corrections and improvements to documents can be tracked and centralized.

However, what works for large enterprises such as BMW and Evian is also proving attractive to small business owners who want a simple way to manage and store their customized presentations. Forthcoming upgrades include support for HTML5 forms that can be stored and filled out locally, then synced with the cloud service for access by others and archiving off the mobile device.

Requests for an iPhone version have sprung out of use of Apple’s Airplay for presentations on larger screens while a Windows 8 version will bring the app to Microsoft’s tablets and the PC desktop. While there’s not a lot of current demand for Windows – three users seems to be the current tally out of the company’s list of about 200 paying organizations – over the long run it is necessary.

“If you have BYOD [in the enterprise], it has to be a multidevice policy,” Lenton said.