Silobreaker Premium: Encompassing Aggregation, Collaboration and Knowledge Management
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

Abstract

Penny Crossland looks at the latest release of Silobreaker Premium, the well-established open source intelligence tool. Like its competitors, over the past year it has developed enhanced workflow and collaboration features. New customisation and reporting functions have made this an excellent monitoring tool and a workflow tool for the enterprise. As well as providing around 300,000 news items a day, it also offers unique content in the form of fact sheets on companies and individuals.

Item

FreePint has been commenting in recent weeks on the trend by news aggregators away from pure current awareness functionality towards workflow and collaboration. Silobreaker, the well-established open source intelligence tool is no exception.

Its powerful analytical and visualisation tools have already ensured Silobreaker's reputation as a sophisticated aggregator. Our last full FreePint review was in February 2012; since then Silobreaker has, like its competitor Newsdesk, expanded its collaboration and customisation features, turning itself into a workflow tool for the enterprise.

Unique Value-Added Content

The number of global sources aggregated by Silobreaker remains unchanged at around 40,000. They provide roughly 300,000 news items per day, from traditional news sources, social media sites, blogs and audio and video publishers. The database still has the handy fact sheets on companies and individuals and relevant quotes of the day - value-added content that is not provided by the competition.

Silobreaker now has news in 10 languages in addition to English, including Farsi, Russian and Arabic, which will appeal to a large portion of its customer base, since Silobreaker's audience is strongly focused on corporations and organisations in the security, military and governmental sectors.

Customisable Dashboard

Subscribers are able to populate a dashboard with up 20 widgets of their choosing, consisting of content-related items, analytical tools, such as networks, bar graphs and pie charts, and social media. Other customisable items include monitoring lists on companies, individuals, products or key phrases, which can be shared with colleagues. You can comment on articles and, most importantly, upload your own content. This is then indexed and analysed like external content. Users with permission rights can then view and edit the content.

New Mobile App

Output is via email alerts, which can contain all Silobreaker's analytical features, RSS feeds and customisable newsletters. Mobile functionality is provided via the recently released Silobreaker app. With all this functionality, it is little wonder then that acquiring new content has become less important - this is after all an end-user tool. Unlike some aggregators, Silobreaker is quite affordable, so a trial is highly recommended.

FreePint Subscribers can log in now to read more in Mini Review: Silobreaker Premium.

Editor's Note: Beyond Aggregation  

This article is part of the FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation, which ran from October to November 2013. You can still register your interest to receive a free copy of the FreePint Report: Buyer's Guide on News Content published in early December.

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