InformationWeek

If you store shared content on multiple Illuminar Servers, the initial server passes user search requests to the other linked remote servers. Each server's independent search results are passed back to the originating server, which returns the consolidated results to the user on a single browser page. Administrators can create virtual sites to represent different areas of the enterprise. For example, one could aggregate three servers with marketing content to let users click on one selection to search all marketing information.

Users have a choice of simple or advanced searches, both of which produce a standard report in which each row represents a wrapper with its contents ranked by relevance. You can view the name of the submitter, data format, and title, click on links to detailed tag information, and download the content to a local drive. Users can also use the Illuminar Contents page to display a hierarchical view of all linked servers on the network; package owners can set or change access control, delete wrappers, find other wrappers with similar content, modify metadata, and view a detailed audit trail of all operations performed on a wrapper.

Illuminar is most useful for large enterprises overflowing with important data--drug companies with governmental approval requirements, manufacturers with the need to integrate enterprise resource planning data with technical documentation, and distributed companies where information and metadata capture must be simplified and the results made available securely via the Web. The product's licensing does not favor virtual collaboration between partners, subcontractors, and suppliers, and smaller companies should wait for major platform integration of these tools.

Microsoft shops might find the product more attractive if the Illuminar Folder were available as an ActiveX control embedded in the browser, but Verano remains committed to a cross-browser, Java client solution. Lotus Development Corp. promises similar knowledge-management features in a future version of Domino/Notes, and Lotus' support for the Component Object Model and Java/Corba may prove to be strategic. But Verano offers tools today that let IT begin to gain control of enterprise content, generating context metadata that can be harvested by emerging standards such as the Extensible Markup Language.

Steve Gillmor is director of Southern Digital Inc., a Charleston, S.C., IT consulting firm; he can be reached at sgillmor@southerndigital.com.

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