Cloud publishing is becoming a major part of content management, almost as big a part as online publishing is among regular people. Supported by newfound capabilities in HTML5, and newfound resources in the form of an extended seed round of investment from New Enterprise Associates valued at $1.6 million, Silk announced its new Silk for Teams system, a powerful new cloud-based publishing tool that will provide technical-grade power for non-technical workers and make documents a lot easier to handle.

With Silk for Teams in hand, users get what amounts to a database’s power and a content management system’s ease of use, allowing for data to be much more readily collected and accessed by users that need to. Where previously, large amounts of time might have been wasted sifting through the endless heaps of documents–spreadsheets, text, presentations, images and more–that would be produced by a business, Silk for Teams allows for not only better compression, but also improved accessibility.

Silk accomplishes all this via the creation of what it calls "Silk sites", a series of structured Web pages that allow for specific tags–the content of same can be determined by the user–that in turn allow for easier, simpler search functions to take place. Using those same tags allows users to create visualizations like charts or maps based on the terms used in the tags and the frequency of use, among other points.

So far, Silk boasts a combined total of 16,000 registered Silk users who as a group have created over 300,000 individual pages, a number which reportedly goes up 20 percent a month. Who’s putting Silk to work? Not only are private businesses–marketing firms and video service providers–putting Silk to work, but so too are media outlets like The Guardian, government agencies, and even not-for-profit groups like Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch’s director of digital, Stephen Northfield, elaborated on the kind of utility that Silk can bring to the table, saying, "Silk lets our non-technical staff convert years of data into beautiful interactive maps and graphics. This allows our team and anyone else the ability to study voting records from almost any vantage point with just a few clicks." Silk even offers, out at its website, some examples of projects completed with Silk.

Businesses run on content. Information about trends, production capability, and even the wider market all fall under the heading of information. But information is useless unless it is available when it is needed, and that’s where many businesses have trouble. Silk–and Silk for Teams–allows for better organization, which means less time spent looking for the necessary document and more time putting said document to work. That means less redundancy, less time lost, more work done. And "more work done" is one of the clearest roads to profitability that ever was.

Silk for Teams may not be for everybody, but for businesses that have a lot of documents to manage, and want to find a way to make those documents more readily accessible, Silk for Teams will likely go a long way in terms of providing that necessary organization. The paperless office may be a pipe dream for many, but Silk for Teams may be a part of making it a reality.