August 7, 2000

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Knowledge Management
Harnessing Corporate Knowledge

Microsoft is gunning for the knowledge-management market with the upcoming Exchange 2000, sporting tighter application integration and a Web repository, but Lotus has a big head start and ambitious plans to link collaboration and transaction systems

By Jeff Angus

More on knowledge management:

Knowledge Management In A Box: The Raven Project (6/19/00)

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essaging is an unusually competitive market, with Microsoft and Lotus Development Corp. playing a fierce game of feature tennis aimed at turning their E-mail and collaboration platforms into the choice of business for enterprise-wide knowledge management.

That brinkmanship is forcing both companies to innovate faster and to integrate their offerings with other corporate systems. The result is a rich set of knowledge-management capabilities for business customers in the form of workflow, repositories, and integration features that will let workers more easily store and harvest intellectual capital. IT managers who are thinking of making the switch from one platform to the other will need to decide how aggressive their collaboration and knowledge-management strategies are.

Lotus Notes and Domino represents a mature platform for building collaborative applications, storing data, and communicating ad hoc information. During the past two years, Lotus has made enhancements in workflow, Web content integration, and electronic learning to position Notes and Domino as a knowledge-management platform. Lotus has delivered a coherent knowledge-management strategy and has always had a strong advantage in the groupware functions that make Notes' clunkier E-mail interface bearable.

Microsoft's upcoming release of Exchange 2000 is upping the ante on Lotus' efforts to dominate the field of communication-based knowledge platforms. Exchange 2000 has the easier E-mail interface--the primary function of messaging--and deeper third-party add-on product support.

If you had to stake your knowledge-management strategy on one of these platforms, I think you'd have to choose Lotus because of its more-coherent and well-rounded knowledge strategy and cleanly bundled, multichannel communication approach that supports real-time chat and team-centered organizational consoles. Also, Lotus better understands the functions that knowledge serves in businesses.

But Microsoft's Exchange 2000 release, due this fall, equals and exceeds a lot of the best knowledge features Lotus is selling: instant messaging, audio-and videoconferencing, and chat. When you add application sharing and the unified storage of message and Office application files for snappier search and retrieval, I can make a strong argument that Microsoft's platform will have some strong advantages late this year.

Lotus' counterpoint Web store, code named Bluejay, will likely be released in late fall.

Lotus has ambitious plans to bring together the worlds of collaboration and transactions to enable companies to carry out structured and ad-hoc business processes across multiple systems. A beta project is under way between Lotus and parent company IBM to integrate Domino and WebSphere application servers. This will likely be the first step in an ongoing integration process between Domino and IBM E-commerce applications and data-management products.

As with all knowledge-management efforts, the technology is far less important than the business processes and human cultural issues that influence success. The right company can succeed with practically any technology. But initiatives that suffer from flawed process-and change-management plans will fail--regardless of the platform the IT department chooses.

If you're determined to become a knowledge-centered organization, Lotus' vision is more beneficial in the near term. But if you're certain that E-mail is the key to your collaboration and you really only want to dabble in knowledge management, then Exchange is a better platform for you.

A deeper look at the companies' development efforts in knowledge management can help your decision.

While Lotus has the advantage of supporting fewer products than Microsoft, it also has more of an overpowering need to stake out knowledge management as an area it dominates. Microsoft, on the other hand, spent a couple of years trying to find the right product to knowledge-enable; and now that it has settled on Exchange, the results are looking promising.

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