October 2, 2000

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Antidote For Information Overload

Online software lets smaller businesses cope with floods of information

By Charles Waltner

More on knowledge collaboration:

sidebar: Vendors Upgrade Groupware For The Web Keep Your Knowledge In-House (9/4/00) EETimes: Need: Net-speed knowledge tools (9/4/00)

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olly Giss, a product manager at Moai Technologies Inc., a midsize San Francisco E-commerce software company, was suffering from a problem afflicting lots of other knowledge workers: information overload.

Giss found herself resorting to printing out everything on paper to help her manage the collection and presentation of the large quantity of online information she used in competitive analysis reports. There didn't seem to be any other way to preserve, format, and share the deluge of information flowing from her PC. Nor was there a big budget available to solve the problem.

But thanks to a growing group of software products designed to help knowledge workers and others struggling under the weight of burgeoning amounts of information from the Web and other digital sources, Giss and others like her have an antidote for the information overload syndrome.

During the last year or so, a handful of software products, usually offered via hosted Web services, have come on the market to directly address the difficulties of managing digital information. The common element of these new information-management and collaboration tools is their focus on reducing the difficulties of sharing, filing, and indexing the most common documents--Web pages and attachments.

These products typically take up little disk space and are low-priced--often free for individual users--making them ideal for lone information rangers, workgroups, departments within a company, and smaller businesses.

Guy Creese, a senior analyst with the Aberdeen Group, calls the new offerings "personal information managers on steroids" and "groupware with a personal flavor." The individual desktop is now well understood, he says: "Now the question is how best to share the info on the desktops."

Whereas E-mail provides simple and effective one-to-one conversational communications, these tools open up one-to-many and many-to-many communications to companies or individuals that need to share more complicated digital files. And since they are typically Web-based, these products break down collaborative communication barriers among people within an enterprise and their partners and customers working outside the company network.

Vendors in the knowledge-collaboration market include Correlate Technologies, HotOffice Technologies, iHarvest, NetDocuments, and Webforia.

Giss found the cure for her information overload problem when she unearthed the iHarvest service, which lets her highlight what she wants from a site. She can also attach notes and highlight the text for emphasis and better guidance for others using the materials.

Giss saves these pieces of information in folders on iHarvest's Web server, which others can access through her password. She particularly likes the iHarvest feature that tracks the source of all the information. In the past, when she would cut and paste information from the Web into a word-processing document for compilation with other information, she would either have to manually make note of its source (Web-site address, etc.) or, just as often, lose track of the information's origins.

The bottom line: IHarvest has made Giss' job easier by streamlining the collection, management, and distribution of information. "I would spend hours just getting the information presentable," she says. "People have so much information now; the problem is what are you going to do with it?"

There's no shortage of knowledge-management tools, some of which have more collaborative features than others. But many, including conventional groupware products such as Lotus Notes, Novell's GroupWise, and Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, come with big price tags and complicated client-server installations that typically require technical and financial support from a company IT department.

continue on to page 2, 3, 4

Illustration by Tom Nick Cocotos
Photo of Giss by Richard Morgenstein

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