KnowledgeTree™, the leading provider of Open Source document management software for small to medium-sized organizations and departmental users, today announced the launch of KnowledgeTreeLive, a software-as-a-service document management application built using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and the rPath virtual appliance platform.

The KnowledgeTreeLive on-demand document management service brings the powerful capabilities of the open source KnowledgeTree application to users wishing to subscribe to an easy to use, cost-effective and secure hosted application. The KnowledgeTreeLive service includes document management and collaboration features such as document versioning and auditing, metadata and content searching, workflow, tagging and tag clouds, RSS feeds and email triggers.

"The KnowledgeTree Open Source application is downloaded over 14,000 times per month. We believe that a significant number of users of the free on-premise software would prefer to utilize a cost-effective hosted document management solution. Being open source means that our customers have peace of mind that they won't be locked in to a proprietary service," said Daniel Chalef, KnowledgeTree COO.

With innovative technology from Amazon Web Services and rPath, KnowledgeTree was able to roll out a highly scalable SaaS document management solution without significant modifications to the KnowledgeTree on-premise application and without investing in extensive datacenter infrastructure.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a highly scalable and affordable virtual infrastructure that eliminated the need for KnowledgeTree to build out their own hosted datacenter infrastructure. The modular KnowledgeTree application was extended to utilize the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), a vast and cost-effective storage service, for KnowledgeTree's user data.

rPath's rBuilder made it easy for KnowledgeTree to transform their existing application into a virtual appliance that could be run on Amazon EC2. KnowledgeTree was able to create their virtual appliance images from the existing KnowledgeTree application; no modifications for multi-tenancy were required. Additionally, using rPath's rBuilder reduced the time to market and number of people required to develop a SaaS solution.

"The unique combination of rBuilder plus Amazon EC2 provides an alternative approach to Software as a Service for application providers," stated Billy Marshall, rPath CEO and co-founder. "This solution means KnowledgeTree can spend less time supporting their product and more time enhancing it, ultimately benefiting the end-user."

rPath's technology also reduces the costs associated with maintaining a SaaS solution with a large number of virtual appliances. Because rPath has been at the forefront of the software and virtual appliance form factor, it made building appliances for use on Amazon EC2 relatively simple.

"Amazon EC2 was built with businesses like KnowledgeTree in mind," said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. "Our technology eliminates the hassles of creating and managing a scalable, on-demand computing infrastructure."

KnowledgeTree has significant community traction with over 25,000 registered community members, over 385,000 open source software downloads to date, and 67 community-run projects. KnowledgeTree is used by small and big business alike - users include Fortune 500 companies, community organizations, local and state governments, and educational, medical and scientific organizations around the world.

KnowledgeTree recently joined 260 other enterprise-grade open source applications on the Optaros Enterprise Open Source Directory. KnowledgeTree's selection out of 140,000 open source applications is significant industry recognition of its position as the leading open source provider of document management solutions to SMB and departmental users.

About KnowledgeTree
KnowledgeTree's vision is to make document management simple. The web-based and AJAX-enabled application is built on the popular open source LAMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack. KnowledgeTree has significant open source community traction and the core product has been downloaded more than 390 000 times to date. It is the leading commercial open source document management system designed for the SMB and departmental user. Customers include the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, DHL Global Mail, Société Générale Group, the State of Georgia Department of Audits, the European Space Agency, Northern Arizona Healthcare, Mazda Motor Europe and Decathlon Stores. KnowledgeTree is also available in three on-premise editions: KnowledgeTree Enterprise, KnowledgeTree SMB and KnowledgeTree Open Source. The commercial on-premise editions of KnowledgeTree are sold with access to priority support and offer additional functionality that provides a familiar Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office interface into the document repository and direct-to-repository scanning capability. For more information, visit http://www.knowledgetree.com .