InformationWeek

Lotus Development Corp.'s knowledge-management server, code-named Raven, will resolve all these problems-or so Lotus promises. "There's a lot of real information that's locked up within an organization and not being leveraged," says Scott Cooper, VP of Lotus' knowledge-management products group.

At Raven's core will be a discovery engine made up of two components: an expertise locator and a content catalog. The expertise locator, a searchable repository of profiles of fellow employees and information about their skills and areas of expertise, will serve as a "Who's Who" within an organization. The locator will create the profiles based on the content of documents that people write and post to a network. The content catalog will provide users with a means of tracking down documents (including Word files, spreadsheets, and E-mail) within a corporate network, data within database systems, and external HTML-based content.

Atop this engine will be a knowledge-management portal that will provide individuals with a means of aggregating and managing the content they have access to, and personalizing their view of the content and applications that run on Raven. The knowledge management system will also include collaboration capabilities.

Just how groundbreaking will Raven be? Though Lotus is developing the discovery engine from scratch, a good chunk of Raven's functionality will come from existing products. The knowledge-management system will incorporate technology from Lotus' Domino groupware server, and its Sametime and Quickplace collaboration software, as well as from IBM's DB2 relational database. Some of the same functionality planned for Raven is already available in such products as Tacit Knowledge Systems Inc.'s Knowledge Mail and Semio Corp.'s Taxonomy.