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here are very few products in the knowledge-management market that attempt to deal with one extremely valuable concept: context. Context management leverages not only the metadata of content but also the profiles and business goals of individual users. Information that may mean nothing to the folks in marketing may propel effective decisions in manufacturing. Context can help bring the searched and the searcher together--and with electronic commerce turning the information spigot on full blast in Internet time, companies must adopt vigorous strategies to produce rapid, targeted results.

While some products employ context as a piece of what they do, Verano's Illuminar is a product wholly focused on cracking the context conundrum. Illuminar 2.0 provides drag-and-drop tools that let content owners combine content and context to publish information in secure packages that can be accessed, managed, and audited via standard browsers. It has three components: the Illuminar Folder, the Server, and the Administration Console. The product ships on Windows 95, Windows NT, and Sun Solaris running on a Netscape Web server, with Apache and Microsoft Internet Information Server support to follow.

Content authors use the Illuminar Folder to "wrap" content and metadata and share it on Illuminar servers. Wrapping is the process of combining a file with its associated metadata, including file system information and context data based on profiles. To wrap, you drag and drop HTML pages, word processing documents, spreadsheets, Acrobat PDF files, and any other media files stored on your computer onto the Folder, where you are prompted to provide values for required and optional metadata tags. The resulting wrappers can be organized hierarchically by department or project to reflect the logical organization of information within a company, making it possible to carefully target and find key information.

Tags fall into three categories: Descriptor tags include such items as author, publisher, modification dates; control tags provide workflow and authentication data, such as the date range when content can be accessed; and security tags determine which users or groups can view and modify information. Some tag values can be inherited, allowing one--for example, a copyright date--to be changed in one wrapper and inherited by all the wrappers below it in the hierarchy.

Context management goes beyond searching in several ways. First, it promotes efficient knowledge reuse by presenting a uniform view into all company sources and maintaining the relationship of each source to the enterprise and its businesses. Context management leverages user metadata to combine proactive delivery with context-sensitive search and discovery, offering targeted data to users with access rights and a common focus.

There are three optional applications you can install in the Folder. The Context Manager lets users and managers create wrapper packages and apply access control to individual wrappers, the Profile Editor provides standard metadata tags that you can modify or supplement to suit specific organizational needs, and the Tag Set Editor creates and edits tags, tag values, and tag sets. Users can deploy profile icons on the desktops as drop targets, making it easy to wrap documents with varying metadata.

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