Lotus unveils its KM future
At its Lotusphere Europe event, Lotus announced Raven, a code-named knowledge management suite that will be available midway through next year.
Raven, which will be marketed as a package rather than individual components, will have three major components--expertise profiling/locating, a collaborative portal and content tracking and analysis piece.
Raven is the compilation of several years of research, resulting in three new products--not a suite of existing or refined products. In an effort to centralize research and development, the company formulated the Raven plan in recent months. Now, development is proceeding on a suite to be unveiled together as one rather than a “tool of the month” approach, said Andrew Mahon, senior manager of strategic marketing for the IBM-subsidiary. Mahon said that considerable market research has lead them to develop and unveil the tools as one.
Raven’s knowledge portal aspect will have a similar look to the welcome or opening page of Notes 5. Users will have panes or “knowledge windows” that allow them to see the information that is important to them in their many job roles. The portal will also allow team or project panes--available to appropriate participants. This will leverage Lotus’s Sametime technology to allow the user to know which team participants are actively working in that space. Then, through the portal, active project participants will be able to collaborate.
Raven’s expertise locator will be a web crawler. In determining expertise it will look at who has authored documents on certain subjects, as well as who has read documents on certain subjects. Before expertise is attached, the users themselves can determine or edit their profile.
Raven’s content catalog component will create and maintain content maps that identify topics and subject matter. The catalog will crawl through text sources and analyze content by evaluating frequency, proximity to other topics, relationship to people and a host of other measures.
It will then identify people's skills from content authored or read, and map thoseindividuals to entries in the catalog. The catalog is constantly refreshed and maintained based on new content and usage data