The Customer

Kabuto is a California based start-up in the enterprise mobility space. The company provides a cloud based, enterprise workforce collaboration & communication platform that securely integrates email, tasks, files, conversations and external apps into a single cloud service, ensuring user privacy and enterprise confidentiality policies. It enables enterprise team members to work together, manage tasks, communicate and share documents in a secure workspace.

Backed by Intertrust Technologies, Kabuto is headquartered in the Bay Area.

THE PROBLEM AND THE FOLIO3 SOLUTION

Founded in 2013 by a team of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Kabuto’s goal is to revolutionize the way enterprise employees work. The company’s founders wanted to create a service that would enable enterprise employees to share, access and edit office documents and files (across teams and departments) in the cloud, using the native editing applications on their desktop and laptop machines.

As they did not have enough resources to develop the solution in house, they were looking for a reliable partner who could help them build out the solution. On recommendation from their fellow entrepreneurs and impressed with Folio3’s cross platform development expertise, Kabuto chose Folio3 as their development partner for this project.

Folio3 assigned a dedicated team to the task who worked in close collaboration with Kabuto’s management to first determine the specifications of the full solution, via a requirements discovery project. Once the requirements were finalized, the team then started on actual development. Kabuto’s management wanted the solution to be cross platform, offering full support for multiple versions of both Windows and Mac OS, as well as the most commonly used web browsers and document editing tools such as such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Office and Open Office.

To cater to these requirements, the Folio3 team decided to develop the solution in Python, making it completely cross platform. The team then created prototypes of the Kabuto desktop application, over multiple iterations to help Kabuto finalize the application’s look and feel and workflow. Kabuto’s feedback was used to modify the application’s design as needed.

After 12 weeks of intensive efforts, the Kabuto desktop application was released. The application works in a similar manner to Dropbox, providing enterprise employees the ability to access, share and edit MS-Office files in a secure, online workspace, using the native editing applications on any Mac and Windows machine. It does so via custom built Microsoft Office and browser extensions (plug-ins) that enable users to view and edit MS Office files locally on their machines. Upon saving, the Kabuto desktop application not only saves a local copy of the file on the user’s machine, but also updates it in the online workspace from which it was accessed.

Thanks to Folio3’s efforts, Kabuto was able to realize its vision for a cross platform, enterprise desktop collaboration solution within the very short of three months. The Kabuto team was so impressed with Folio3’s work on the Kabuto Desktop application, that they engaged Folio3 to develop a cross platform mobile solution for them as well, one that would enable enterprise users to communicate, share files and collaborate using their Android and iOS devices.