August 7, 2000

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Knowledge Management
Harnessing Corporate Knowledge

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By Jeff Angus

More on knowledge management:

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

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While Lotus sees Sametime as a turbocharged engine to support its collaborative commerce initiative mentioned earlier, it's also adding features to beef up Sametime as a distance-learning and conference pipeline by adding a one-to-many broadcast capability and connections with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-enabled directories.

The directory connections will prove a vital amplifier for knowledge-management efforts when blended with the ability to capture person-to-person, real-time communication. For developers, Lotus is providing a single Sametime API to interface with other applications and a Java toolkit that will let developers download only the elements of the service they need.

Microsoft Exchange developers can produce rich applications using all the Exchange Web store and conferencing server services and Outlook Web Access, the browser client to Exchange 2000. The addition of a synchronous workflow engine expands Exchange's intrinsic abilities to be a container for highly sequential work processes (forms processing, for example), which makes powerful use of the communication-centered knowledge required in those applications.

Lotus lobbed a competitive grenade back at its Redmond, Wash., buddies in late June by releasing Domino Workflow 2.1, which adds an Extensible Markup Language interface and integration with IBM components such as MQSeries messaging. Lotus is making it simple to archive instances of processes that made their way through the Domino workflows into a Domino.Doc store for later analysis.

This month, Microsoft is releasing a smarter Digital Dashboard 2.0. The first version was a raw, if interesting, tool for building business portals. The new toolkit is more evolved, with wrappers for creating reusable components.

This should match, and possibly trump, the Notes Release 5 Portal Builder, although, in general, Lotus' integrated development environment is a more-integrated console for producing applications than the broad range of Microsoft tools that you need.

Lotus can still claim superiority in some forward-looking areas. Its upcoming Raven knowledge-discovery engine is a well-thought-out back-end product for finding and analyzing information sources, managing communities of interest, and locating expertise. At the front end, developers will be able to snap in components such as the expertise locator and the content catalog with application templates to create customized browser clients that link into corporate portals. This is breathtaking by current technology standards.

Moreover, Lotus is planning a third-quarter release of its Bluejay object store initiative, which includes a Net Store that makes Notes' databases accessible in conventional Windows folder-and-file controls. Like Microsoft's Web store, Bluejay will be able to contain all types of content. It will also have collaboration objects and an OLE/DB connector to better integrate Lotus' stores with Microsoft databases such as SQL Server and Access.

Lotus officials also recently unveiled a set of collaboration objects to make it easier for programmers to use Domino features--such as E-mail, collaboration, and workflow--that are intended to match Exchange's object model.

Finally, the iNotes Internet schema supports Outlook as a mail and calendar client on a Domino server, though this doesn't appear to be a feature business users are dying for.

The flurry of counterpunches in the knowledge-management arena is remarkable for the actual value it offers customers. Users able to deal with change can thrive as a result of this head-to-head combat.

Company IT departments interested in deploying knowledge applications will have a couple of months to play with Exchange 2000 and test important attributes, such as ease of development and deployment, before Lotus comes back with its counterpunch. Incremental pilot projects will yield a lot of insight for those who can escape the static comforts of the status quo.

Jeff Angus is a principal consultant with Lighthouse Consulting Group. He can be reached at jeff.angus@lhcg.com

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