Extranet & Collaboration

Design work, technical specs, development documents, orders - the volume of information underpinning the way your medical device or high-tech product business operates internally and collaborates with external partners can be astounding. And can you be sure that you are managing it securely, efficiently and productively?

Cognidox provides a robust solution for managing information as it flows within and outside your business. Your own-brand Extranet allows you to cascade knowledge to relevant audiences, with you deciding which users see what information.

And it could help you battle the silos that so often hamper product innovation, by allowing the sharing of pertinent documentation - for review and approval - across multi-faceted teams, internally and externally, to foster greater collaboration.

Cognidox Extranet: access controlled as you need

Documents are pushed to the Extranet server from your Cognidox server; this allows feedback to be shared with Cognidox, but no other interaction with the document lifecycle that is managed in the core DMS.

Our fine-grained licensing model ensures that you control the entitlement of Extranet users to any and all content, as you wish. Imagine being able to set up a customer fulfilment process in advance of a release deadline. When launch day arrives, it’s simply a matter of pressing the button and all the related content is published automatically to your portal for customers to access.

With Cognidox, your business can share design specifications, software, drawings, and more with sub-contracted manufacturers, as a set of controlled documents once they have been fully approved.

A successful IP business needs to be in control of its IP and Cognidox allows you to do this. You can use security enhancements, such as document watermarking, to keep tight control over the distribution of confidential materials.

Limited Access Partners

The "Limited Access Partner" functionality in Cognidox allows partners such as sub-contractors, marketing agencies, 3^rd party developers, etc to collaborate in the document creation, review and approval process.

These partners are created as users in your Cognidox system but they are granted only very restricted access to your information. Your administrator can define the subset of data viewable and available to such partners.

Fostering collaboration in product development

Most high-tech and medical device companies will be working with multiple product lines. In turn, each of those products combine multiple project deliverables, requiring input from numerous functions across the business.

The hardware team may have files created in AutoCAD or SolidWorks for CAD design. Whilst the software team may use Git or JIRA Cloud for the version control of software programs.

Meanwhile, across the office, your technical authors are working with Madcap Flare to produce your user guides. And so it continues across Training, Technical Support - each team operating in its own universe.

And that's where collaboration is key. You can have great teams using the best tools, but still suffer from disconnection within your product development.

Elimination of silos

Cognidox is the "silo-linker" that solves this problem of disjointedness and gives a Product Release Manager a useful set of tools. Here’s how:

• It provides a common repository for all the individual specialist tool outputs. In-feeds from mechanical drawing, software development and technical authoring (to name a few) all end up in the same place.
  
  
• It enables a common review and approval workflow across teams and job functions. Dashboard tools instantly let users see the 'health' of a product category, to judge whether it is ready for a “Gate Review” meeting, for example.
  
  
• Document holder files can be used to describe what components make up the product. A document holder is a special Cognidox document type automatically formatted into a web page with links and related information.
  
  
• The Product Manager user role in Cognidox includes features useful for Release Managers. For example, they can build a release configuration where content is tagged with a licence and customers are assigned licences for access entitlement. Licences can be linked to anything that binds a set of customers: product type, geography, service level agreement, generation of product, early adopters, and so on.
  
  
• At product release time, content is automatically copied to the Extranet web portal where it is available for customer download. No more panics at 6pm Friday (always the designated release day!) to "get everything out the door".
  
  
• Download activity by customers is automatically tracked on an individual document level. Analytics like this can give insights into the way individual content (such as a new release of software drivers or a quick start guide) is being consumed.

Simple set-up, seamless user experience

With the Cognidox Extranet there are no “set-up” or “on-boarding” charges. You don’t have to worry about software updates, uptime or other monitoring – we do that for you.

A partner login button on your own website is all you need to make this a seamless experience for external users. And there's no lengthy, expensive “consulting” period, we will customise the look and feel in accordance with your corporate brand within hours. This way, you will enjoy the full value of your Extranet within days.