Knowledge-Management Tools
This Explorer technology area has been discontinued.
Viewpoints
2011
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June:
The Return of Virtual Reality
Announcement: Knowledge-Management Tools Becomes Collaboration Tools -
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April:
Cultural Issues, Working Practices, and Growth of Collaboration Tools
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March:
Facebook Cofounder Targets Workplace Collaboration
Google Wave's Legacy Lives On -
February:
Transcribing Calls and Meetings for Next-Generation Collaboration
2010
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December/January:
2010: The Year in Review
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Adding Interoperability and Intelligence to Unified Communications
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2009
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December/January:
2009: The Year in Review
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Recent Developments: Lotus Notes to Integrate with LinkedIn | Lifelogging
2008
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December/January:
2008: The Year in Review
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November:
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Recent Developments: Army's KM Effort | IBM's Integration of Lotus Sametime with Virtual Worlds
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2007
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December/January:
2007: The Year in Review
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Commercial Opportunities in Knowledge Management Tools
Enterprise Search -
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Developments in Videoconferencing Technology May Herald Changes in Face-to-Face Collaboration
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2006
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December/January:
2006: The Year in Review
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November:
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Software "Revivals" May Catalyze New Approaches toward Knowledge Work
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Summary of eLearning Forum Meeting: Learning Eco-Systems, Infrastructure, and Architecture
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2005
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December/January:
2005: The Year in Review
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November:
Knowledge Work, Information Processing, and Information Overload: Issues and Potential Solutions
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October:
Computational Tools to Model Workflow, Organizations, and Collaborative Processes
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August:
Human Factors in Design and Deployment of Knowledge-Management Systems
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July:
Personal-Knowledge Management
Synergistic Technologies: Broadband Wireless Networks -
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Life Blogging
Recent Developments: Groove Networks Inc. Acquired by Microsoft -
February:
Developments toward Improved Knowledge Management in Telemedicine
2004
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December/January:
2004: The Year in Review
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Software Tools for Corporate Collaboration and Communications
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Conceptual Hierarchy: Relationships between Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom
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2003
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December/January:
2003: The Year in Review
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2002
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December/January:
2002: The Year in Review
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The Semantic Web: Computers to Communicate Intelligently through the World Wide Web
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2001
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December/January:
2001: The Year in Review
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November:
Metadata, Learning, and Knowledge Objects
Recent Developments: XML-Based Web Directory Standard -
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Knowledge-Management Tools for Rent: Application Service Providers
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2000
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December/January:
2000: The Year in Review
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November:
Groove Transceiver, Novel Peer-to-Peer Software for Collaboration
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1999
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December/January:
1999: The Year in Review
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October:
Market for Customer Service Self-Help
Recent Developments: Instant Voice Messaging? -
September:
Instant Messaging, Originally a Consumer Service, Is Catching on with Businesses
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August:
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Before August 1999, the Explorer service was called TechMonitoring, and Viewpoints were TechLinks.
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Managing Corporate Information and Knowledge for Greater Efficiency
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March:
Distributed Collaboration Enabled with Small, Connected Devices
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Before March 1999, the Knowledge-Management Tools technology area was Groupware.
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February:
Wearable Computers for Collaboration
Three-Dimensional Collaboration and Wearable Computers
1998
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December/January:
1998: The Year in Review
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1997
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1997: The Year in Review
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1996
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1996: The Year in Review
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1995: The Year in Review
Look for These Developments in 1996
About This Technology
June 2010
Knowledge-management tools are the software infrastructure that enables companies to collaborate, share knowledge, and learn. Many vendors and users now consider collaboration to be the highest-priority area. In the long term, these tools have the potential automatically to record, discover, and organize all corporate data; annotate employees' work and meetings with pertinent information; and manage parts of a company's operations such as project staffing. Knowledge-management tools span a wide spectrum of software—from tools for storing, managing, and delivering content to real-time collaboration systems. A knowledge-management product may be a large system serving an entire enterprise or it may be a small Web-based application serving a project team. This Technology Map covers enterprise content-management systems, enterprise search, portals, Web conferencing, online workspaces, online communities, intelligence systems, wikis, blogs, and social networking.
Today, the traditional approach to knowledge management—including centralized, well-organized databases and professional knowledge-management staff—is in transition as Web 2.0 tools like wikis and social-networking software arrive in the enterprise from the ground up. Employees and department managers are adopting Web 2.0 tools without the sanction, or even knowledge, of their IT departments or corporate knowledge-management teams. Some IT departments and corporate knowledge managers are understandably concerned about the security risk and lack of coordination that Web 2.0 tools are creating—for example, enterprises are finding that their employees have adopted many Web-based applications from small vendors and that enterprise knowledge is effectively becoming lost in these small, local, applications. However, enlightened senior managers are recognizing that they need to capitalize on their employees' newfound enthusiasm for collaboration and knowledge sharing and are trying—with mixed levels of success—to provide new corporate knowledge-management systems with Web 2.0 features. This new phase of knowledge management is not just the preserve of start-ups; Microsoft, IBM, and other large vendors are adding Web 2.0 capabilities into their products.
Knowledge management may remain in a transitional state for some years as the global recession puts the brakes on major new IT investments and creates consolidation and bankruptcies among small-to-medium players in KM. During this time, corporate knowledge-management teams will be under pressure to demonstrate their value to the business—difficult in situations in which employees have taken collaboration and knowledge sharing into their own hands. Foresighted users and vendors will begin the regeneration of corporate knowledge management. Now is the time to look beyond Web 2.0 and consider how augmented reality, speech recognition, artificial intelligence, and new user interfaces could transform workplace collaboration. For example, perhaps every business meeting will one day have a virtual component as software and hardware overlay pertinent information, such as the name and schedule of each participant; automatically capture meeting minutes; and assign tasks to task lists.