Blue Rooster (www.bluerooster.com), an interactive agency and technology company specializing in driving adoption of Global 500 intranets in today’s consumer-driven world, today announced the availability of “Madison” (www.sharewithmadison.com), a pioneering document sharing and collaboration tool based on Microsoft SharePoint. Blue Rooster developed Madison to make sharing business documents easier than ever before by enabling users to collaborate on documents and manage project folders both inside and outside their respective firewalls.

As part of today’s launch, Blue Rooster announced that Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc., the market leader in document imaging scanners, is Madison’s first enterprise customer.

Adding to its ease of adoption, Blue Rooster engineered Madison to leverage the core IT infrastructure already in place for the vast majority of Global 500 companies: Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Microsoft Azure. Being powered by SharePoint and Azure enables seamless integration for Madison. In addition to security benefits, this also allows Madison to be cost-effective, as corporations can keep their IT infrastructure within the Microsoft ecosystem.

“As a key North American business unit within a multinational corporation such as Fujitsu, we know that the ability to securely share files and improve collaboration that Madison empowers is of tremendous value for our employees that are constantly interacting with stakeholders across multiple countries,” said Scott Francis, vice president of marketing, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. “We look forward to working with Blue Rooster to establish and deepen the implementation to assist in the SharePoint-based document collaboration with our workforce around the globe.”

“We developed Madison to provide a simple and clean user experience, requiring little to no employee training and offering seamless document sharing, all supported by the security of internal networks and Microsoft’s proven enterprise software and cloud infrastructure,” said Kevin Conroy, Blue Rooster founder and president. “In doing so, Madison breaks new ground, as while existing third-party document sharing services are popular, they can be cumbersome to use and sometimes fail to adequately address many companies’ security policies by placing documents and other files outside of the firewall. We are thrilled to be launching this solution for enterprise workforces who stand to benefit from the improved employee collaboration and productivity that Madison can facilitate.”

Conroy added that Madison was especially designed to accommodate and share files that are too big to email or that require extra levels of security. On the back-end, the combination of Microsoft SharePoint and Azure helps to provide a proven and secure platform for Madison to work effectively for corporate users.

In addition, Madison offers a document sharing capability that simultaneously addresses simplicity, flexibility, and security:

• User experience: Blue Rooster developed Madison to be easier than other document sharing options. From a SharePoint document library, users can right-click on a document or folder and select “Share with Madison” from the context menu. They can then enter the recipient or recipients, compose a short message, adjust security settings and send it along. From that point, the recipient receives an email with a link. The recipient just has to click, log in or create an account, and they have access to the document or folder. New users can sign up for a free 5GB Madison account and start collaborating immediately.
• Activity feeds: Madison incorporates employee activity feeds to support improved internal communication and true collaboration. Madison’s activity feeds are also tied to SharePoint’s social feeds;
• Flexibility: If users want or need to send the link over IM and not via email, they can simply take the link from Madison and paste it in their IM. And if they’re navigating in a folder full of documents, “Gallery view” and “Preview” capabilities enable users to sort through the documents quickly. They can also open documents in the browser, where a Madison sharing menu is available on the right side of the screen.
• Security: Madison allows users to password-protect the files they share. If a user only shares a single file, the recipient won’t be able to access any of the other files in the folder. And the “Share with Madison” capability can be added to any document library within a SharePoint installation, but does not need to be installed on all libraries, so IT can manage the libraries on an individual basis.

Madison also provides specific functionality around document preview and commenting in which users can comment on shared documents in the document preview mode. Madison’s preview capability supports a wide variety of document types, including Microsoft Office file formats as well as PDFs, images and movies.

Madison users can also monitor activity feeds and manage access to shared documents and folders accordingly. They can also manage versions of designated documents, as previous versions are archived and can be recovered at any time for updating or reference.

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About Blue Rooster

Building the Globally Connected Enterprise™, Blue Rooster (www.bluerooster.com) is an interactive agency and technology company specializing in driving adoption of Global 500 intranets in today’s consumer-focused world. Blue Rooster works with the world’s leading companies, helping them to Create, Build, and Experience powerful and intuitive Microsoft SharePoint solutions that are easy to adopt in the enterprise. A US-based team of UX designers, strategists and software engineers, Blue Rooster delivers the connected User Experience that is required in today's marketplace; on premise, in the cloud and on any device. Blue Rooster works with Fortune 500 companies in Pharma, Healthcare, Consumer Products, Financial Services, Logistics, Energy and Technology. Working with such clients as FedEx, Abbott Labs, Chevron, Eli Lilly and Microsoft, the company develops collaborative solutions that work across multiple platforms, teams and devices.