IdeaPlane

» see ideaplane.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nobody ever signed up for IdeaPlane. Your compliance department did. It was an enterprise social network sold specifically into finance and other heavily regulated industries, which is a category that exists for one reason: a brokerage cannot let its staff talk to each other on a platform where the messages are not captured. The Next Web, covering the sale, described a platform built in partnership with one of the world's largest investment banks, and declined to say which one, because the whole point of the arrangement was that nobody would ever see it from outside.

Idea Plane Limited was incorporated in London on 26 April 2010, company number 07235153. Its founder was James Henry Fabricant, who had been an executive at MySpace International, which is a strange and quite specific career move: from the loudest consumer social network of the previous decade to the quietest possible version of the same technology, one where the feature list is indistinguishable from a surveillance specification. English Wikipedia says the product was built around the retention and monitoring rules of FINRA and of the UK Financial Services Authority, and that it launched with two top-ten global investment banks as founding clients.

On 28 November 2012 Workshare, a London company whose business was comparing versions of documents for law firms, announced that it had bought it. Terms were not disclosed. Workshare's chief executive Anthony Foy described a combined platform that would let organizations monitor and closely control the social network being used inside them, which is an unusually honest piece of enterprise copy: the product's value was the control, and the socializing was the thing being controlled.

~ the dossier ~

~ eight days before the announcement ~

The Companies House filing history carries a detail the press release does not. Fabricant was appointed a director on the day the company was incorporated and resigned on 20 November 2012. The other directors, who had joined on 30 March 2012, resigned on the same day, and a single new director was appointed to replace all of them that same day. The acquisition was made public eight days later.

That sequence is the ordinary mechanics of a small British acquisition, where the register records when control actually changed and the press records when somebody was ready to talk about it. But it does mean the founder had stopped being a director of his own company before most people had heard it was sold. Fabricant gave the usual acquisition quote to CMSWire about a shared vision for social tools in the enterprise, by which point he had been off the board for over a week.

~ what happened to the product ~

The site stayed up for about a year after the sale, unchanged. Archive captures show the same 8,217-byte marketing page from December 2012 straight through to November 2013, which is the signature of a page nobody is maintaining and nobody has decided to take down. In December 2013 it collapsed to a 254-byte stub, and it held that shape until the host began returning a 403 around 2016.

Workshare folded the technology into its own cloud collaboration product, with groups and status updates bolted onto document sharing. There is no shutdown announcement for IdeaPlane as a standalone service anywhere, which is normal for a business-to-business acquisition: the customers were a handful of banks on individually negotiated contracts, and they were told directly. Workshare itself was absorbed by its competitor Litera in 2019, and workshare.com today answers under a Litera product title.

~ the shell on the register ~

The company outlasted the product by a decade. Idea Plane Limited stayed on the Companies House register as a dormant subsidiary of Workshare Technology Holdings, filing audit-exempt subsidiary accounts, its registered office following its parent's to an address in Kingston upon Thames. The last accounts were made up to 31 December 2022 and filed in December 2023. Directors were appointed and resigned repeatedly between 2018 and 2024 on a shell with no business left in it.

The first Gazette notice for voluntary strike-off went up on 30 April 2024 and the company was dissolved on 16 July 2024. That is the only day-precise date in this entire story, and it refers to a legal entity that had not sold anything in eleven and a half years. ideaplane.com now serves 114 bytes of registrar parking script, the same body returned by a long list of dead British startups whose domains expired into the same reseller.

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