ECM Vendor Knowledge Tree Helping to Reforest Africa

by Lisa Hoover - Oct. 06, 2009Comments (0)

Open source enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Knowledge Tree announced quite a generous offer today. Every time a customer places an order over $4,500, the company will plant a tree in Africa on their behalf. Food & Trees for Africa (FTFA) will do the actual overseas planting and the customer will receive a certificate outlining details of the contribution made in their honor.

Lindy Grobler, Marketing Manager at KnowledgeTree says partnering with FTFA was a natural choice. "KnowledgeTree was originally founded in South Africa and maintains a base of operations there, we felt it was important to support a local organization. After researching several African environmental programs, we chose FTFA because of its commitment to both environmental sustainability and neighborhood beautification."

According to FTFA, planting trees in Africa "gives to the planet and offsets carbon dioxide emissions." In fact, it's such a benefit that the United Nations undertook a campaign to encourage countries to plant a total of seven billion trees across the planet -- a milestone that was reached just last month.

If you're shopping for document management software for your business, Knowledge Tree is definitely worth a look. The company released Knowledge Tree version 3.61 in July, along with a new Microsoft Office add-in. As our own Sam Dean points out, "[the] new release includes new enhancements focused on compliance, and is more interoperable with other productivity applications. For example, KnowledgeTree's new Microsoft Office add-in means that Microsoft applications users can open, edit, save and e-mail documents that reside in the KnowledgeTree repository from within Office applications, as they would if the documents resided on a shared drive."

Grobler says the although the promotion is currently only accessible to businesses that require 40 or more licenses, the company will re-evaluate its terms if necessary. "The program is still evolving and if we receive interest from smaller businesses to have trees planted on their behalf, we're open to modifying the terms of the promotion."

There is no hard deadline for the close of the program and, instead, Knowledge Tree has opted to leave it open-ended. "We expect to continue it for quite a while to ensure we're able to make a meaningful contribution," says Grobler.