KMWorld 2008: Portals for Knowledge Sharing

Presenter: Janus Boye of J. Boye

Janus is a big fan of social media such as wikis and Facebook because they focus on community and knowledge sharing.   Janus presents his Top 4 Knowledge Sharing Enemies:

  1. Intranets – because they are not editable. Wikis can be a solution here.
  2. Knowledge Management – because they tend to be chaotic; there are few success stories out there.
  3. Email – it’s chaos
  4. Shared Drives – issues with version control, and no one can ever find anything.

Keys to successful knowledge sharing: There are multiple cultures within any size organization, so it’s best to be as open as you can. The more open we can be, the better chance we will have to share knowledge. Examples of knowledge sharing vendor solutions:

  • Oracle Web Center Wiki
  • IBM Lotus Quickr – similar to Facebook inside the enterprise
  • Liferay – open source solution
  • Vignette Community Applications

There is lots of innovation going on in open source arena; on the propreitary side, there is consolidation due to larger vendors purchasing smaller ones. J. Boye has published a report, The Enterprise Portals Report, which evaluates various solutions.