Moprise Is Launching A “Flipboard For The Enterprise”

Moprise is launching a new iPad application it’s calling a “Flipboard for the Enterprise.” The app is a tablet-optimized version of the company’s currently available Coaxion iPhone application. The Flipboard analogy isn’t quite right, however. Flipboard is about reading news and articles, browsing photos and viewing updates from your social networks in a magazine-like format. Coaxion and Flipboard are only similar in that they both have easy-to-browse, touchable, swipe-friendly user interfaces. But Coaxion’s content is corporate documents, not news or tweets.

At launch, Coaxion for iPad will connect to both Dropbox and SharePoint services. For the former, you need your username and password to connect, and for the latter, all you need is that, and a SharePoint URL. The I.T. department doesn’t necessarily have to be involved in the setup or configuration, allowing for a bottom-up adoption cycle.

Moprise’s platform can connect to SharePoint out of the box, something which two of Moprise’s Co-founders, David D’Souza and Russell Williams, both ex-Microsofties, know a little something about.

Documents in Coaxion are dragged down to the iPad from these services, where they can be made available for offline viewing. In addition, the main Coaxion interface has user-generated streams called “Discussions.” Files are dragged-and-dropped into these streams and individual users can be added as contributors. They can then add their own files and share notes within the stream, which the rest of the stream’s subscribers can view.

Future versions of the application will include support for other services, including Google Docs and Salesforce. Box.net support may or may not be available at launch, too.

Later updates will include more synchronization features, allowing Coaxion users to tap a “sync” button to automatically synchronize their offline documents with the versions hosted in the cloud. Even further down the road this process will be automated – no button-pushing needed. This would solve one the app’s primary issues at present: documents will quickly become out-of-date  if you don’t keep pulling down the most recent version.

This is less of an issue for users on the Enterprise level of service, though. Enterprise customers can use special Moprise software on their internal infrastructure to push changes down to iPad users as needed, but this is a premium feature. Meanwhile, for a limited subset of services and offline documents, the app will be free. The next step up is a $20/month per user plan. Enterprise pricing varies.

The iPad app will be available in a few weeks time.

Moprise raised $500,000 in angel funding in July. It has 6 full-time employees, based in the Seattle area. The company is not looking to raise additional funding at present, it says.