eKnowledge or Knowledge Sharing is one of the most misunderstood and misused IT applications and yet its aims are very simple:

• Build on what you have and what you have learned.
• Avoid having to constantly rebuild and relearn from scratch.

The basic idea is that every time someone in an organisation produces a proposal, develops a methodology or solves a problem - that information should be immediately available to others who are in a similar situation. The net result is that new proposals are produced and problems are solved faster and easier. The applications for eKnowledge include:

• Managing Public Relations Information. Finding out what is being said about your organisation in the Press so that you can develop strategies to counter PR problems.
• Managing Customer response Information such as Proposal Documentation, Product Information and Price Guides so that they are available to all the people who need them.
• Developing new ways of doing things that build on what you have done in the past - Reusing Knowledge.
• Managing and maintaining Company Information Assets that are often lost with changes in staffing.

Often Knowledge sharing goes hand in hand with Customer Relationship management (CRM) (link) as a way of maximising customer response. Using both applications together creates a complete nerve centre for managing customer responses.

In many ways, the internet itself is a massive knowledge sharing resource. It does, however, have a number of drawbacks:

• Lack of structure makes it harder to quickly find and evaluate information specific to you business needs.
• Lack of security makes it difficult to store confidential information in such an open way.
• Information cannot be rated to state whether it is valuable or not.
• Even when storing information downloaded from the net, it has no context or conclusions for passing onto other people in your organisation

ICE:eKnowelde is about more than just gathering up bits of information, it is about making information and documentation reusable and a basis for further progress. The system consists of the following key components:

Data Collection Tools

Putting information in a data store is generally done as part of day to day working rather than having someone just doing this task. For this reason we provide a number of tools for uploading and archiving information. These include:

• Image & File Uploading

You can specify a file to upload and this will be transferred to the system.

• URL Linking & Harvesting

If you come across an interesting webpage, it can either be linked to or harvested. If harvested a copy of the page is transferred to your knowledge store.

• File System Linking

You can point to files or directories on your file system to automatically link those to the knowledge store. Files are not copied in this case so that no duplication of information takes place.

• Saving

When saving form VB enabled applications such as MS Word and MS Excel, it is possible to automatically update the Data Store. This approach means that files are added to the store just through the normal work process.

Category Management / Article Management

Once you have linked or uploaded a file into the knowledge store, an Article is automatically created on the system. Any additional information about the document is attached to the Article so that it can be used in a variety of different ways without requiring multiple copies of the source file.

This Article can then be placed in as many categories as required in order to make it easier to relocate and to this end the system contains a very flexible category system that allows any kind of hierarchical structure to be developed.

A number of additional fields can be added to each Article if required to allow mire information about the article to be stored with it. This might include date information or authorship details and is entirely dependent upon the customers requirements. Each article can also be linked to other articles where pathways for further reading or articles of additional use have been decided.

Searching

After being stored on the system and categorized, Articles can be recovered either directly using an Article name or code or via searching. Searching for information in the store can be accomplished through a number of methods:

Text Search - Similar to Searching on the Internet in that this returns any Articles or source files that contain the search text.

Specific Search - Allows different values to be placed in Article fields to allow range searches such as Articles created between certain dates by a specific author.

Finding and recovering articles is only one half of the eKnowledge process. Once on the system this information can be used in a variety of ways that add value to the data and the organisation.

Discussion Forums

The system comes with a built-in Discussion Forum component that allows thread based Discussions to be attached to Categories / Articles / Folders and Groups. Forums are used to record both commentary and dialogue information that personnel may consider to be important. The Forums also support rating an article to helps other people when evaluating it.

Folder Management

While Categories are created centrally and available for all articles, folders are user specific. Any user may create a folder and then place articles in it. In this way, employees can utilise the company knowledge store to help them develop their own files containing the articles they find most useful. They can also create specific Project Files and then share these files amongst a Project Group for ease of reference. If also using ICE:CRM, tasks can be linked to folders in order to use the system for Project Management.

Folders Can also be made Public so that it can be used by all system users.

User Management / Grouping & Alerts

The system comes with a complete User Management and Access Control System. While Categories and Articles are by default public in that all users can see them, they can be made group specific. This allows only users in those groups to see the respective Articles. Users can create their own Groups and manage their User Settings. These include the ability to control Alerts. Alerts are emails that are sent as a result of changes to categories, groups and discussions which a user has chosen to monitor.

For more information about ICE: eKnowledge, please contact eknowledge@adtworld.com