Knowledge Plaza

Overview

Using many of the most talked about aspects of web 2.0 (tagging, social networks, RSS real-time dashboards and social search), Knowledge Plaza enables information professionals to collaborate around information sources, documents, and discussions and contribute to an ever growing knowledge base.

Knowledge creators add information to Knowledge Plaza in the form of 'tiles'. A tile is our word for a knowledge artifact which could be a website, reference, document, discussion, contact or any information type imaginable.

Knowledge Plaza adds a social layer on top of the information database. Tiles can then be tagged in a structured way, commented, followed so that information professionals can actually interact and collaborate around the information. This provides greater visibility, an ever evolving and refined database and fosters discussions and new ideas.

Knowledge Plaza also provides a powerful search engine that indexes not only the content of documents and metadata but also indexes the content of external sources like web pages and emails. The search engine combined with the structured tagging system gives a mix of both worlds from the full text search engines and the structured directories.

Knowledge creators can also gather different tiles with a content or topic analysis into what we call a “mosaic”. The mosaic is thus a knowledge package that can be exported or shared internally and externally. Mosaics are used for topic research, project management, market analysis...

On the other side knowledge consumers can be given access to all or part of the work done by the knowledge creators. They can browse, and search the information they need for their business. They can interact with the knowledge creators by asking questions or giving feedback with a 2-way communication between the different communities.

Knowledge consumers can also follow different topics if they want to be alerted when new tiles that matter to them are added into Knowledge Plaza. This way, consumers can have a personalized feed of information without the noise of news that is not relevant for them.

Benefits

Knowledge Plaza offers a solution that focuses on three needs:
- Provide knowledge creators with an advanced and customizable tool to collect and organize information such as e-mails, press articles, documents, web sites content, videos from multiple sources and in multiple formats
- Provide knowledge consumers with a user friendly tool to quickly search for and retrieve relevant information to support their business processes.
- Provide a powerful and customizable interface between communities of knowledge creators and knowledge consumers fostering sharing of knowledge and reinforcing team interaction.

A differentiating feature of Knowledge Plaza versus competitors is that it focuses on productivity gains, lead time reduction and quality improvement for both knowledge creators and knowledge consumers.