Every once in a while we come across the problem of explaining the same set of questions over and over to a different bunch of people within an organization or helping resolve the typical questions faced by a client. For some, it could be questions pertaining to helping out the new interns maybe in the form of dos and don’ts for others it could be a set of technical question which each new employee might come across. 
The standard approach has always been, assigning an experienced staff member from the organization and help the new intern/employee with the rookie questions they might have.
Chandigarh based Assistwindow is building a platform to help mine the internal knowledge and knowhow of an organization. The idea is simple, building a Q&A platform for sharing and organization knowledge within a company and avoiding co-workers distract each other.
Think of Assistwindow like an internal Quora for the organization. Each organization has a typical set of challenges and questions unique to its product and processes. So now instead of having to seek help from a co-worker which wastes precious time and money for the organization. The user can simply look it up on Assistwindow and seek the solution when the same challenge was previously faced and the team contributed towards the optimum solution.
This makes sense as now, each new user facing the same challenge can share his/her insight and contribute to the question making the final solution a crowd sourced effort of the organization. The use case is especially critical for those organizations which see a lot of interns. Now instead of having them come over asking every single question. They could first look those up and then ask their doubts.
For a product with such huge utility, the team comprises only of the husband and wife duo of Abhiraj and Shaban Malhotra. Abhiraj is a lead developer at an educational organization where he came across the challenge of explaining the same set of questions to each new customer for that enterprise. He came up with the idea of documenting the typical questions that they faced and making it Quora style where others could also contribute their bit and thus Assistwindow was born. The educational company for which Abhiraj works is also a user of the product.
In our use we found Assistwindow to be compelling choice. The questions are well organized across groups/teams whereby questions dealing with the say marketing are shown only to those team members who are a part of it. Like any typical task management system the groups and members are all fluid and can be changed at any time.
Currently the duo is working on adding functionalities like marking the top answers for quick overview and answering a question by simply replying to an email. The pricing currently varies from as low as $19 /month for 30 users upto $249/month for unlimited users.
The product would face competition from intranet knowledge management systems which are prevalent in some organizations in the form of freely editable wikis. But the core idea of creating an internal knowledge sharing system where answers are crowd sourced by the team is clever. The focus is on creating a well-documented system for handy use and reference by all the employees and is done in a manner which is both simple and less daunting for non-technical employees and we just might have a winner.
What are your thoughts? Do give Assistwindow a spin and share your comments.
