(Copyright © 2002 T Bruce Tober)
CommunitySpace: Tell us more about how ISYS works. You collect the information with ISYS, and then it pops up on your screen in a list. Are there further steps you can take? For example, can you build a database of the names and locations of these files that meet a query?
Ian Davies: Yes, we have a number of tools. One is the Resource Registry which can drag a document or a group of information items into a project folder. It's just a way of grouping and clustering what you've found.
Another component is the Knowledge Warehouse. It's the place to put all those things you don't know where else to put. All those little files you might have and bits of text. For example, I might send you an e-mail that's 99% junk but there's just that one sentence or paragraph that you think might come in handy some day. You can just highlight that e-mail, drag it and drop it in the Knowledge Warehouse and it'll be there to be found in future.
And there's the Intelligent Agent. If you're in a corporate environment and you're looking for something today and can't find it, you can tell the Agent to keep an eye out for it and it will track all material coming on to your machine for material meeting the query you set.
CommunitySpace: Are the various component products required to be run together or can they each be run as standalones as well?
ID: They all fit together into an integrated suite. As standalones, they fall into two categories: products that help you build a database and products that help you do something useful with it.
For example our imaging product puts paper into the database, while our spidering product handles Web sites. Having built the database you can then use it with ISYS:Desktop or ISYS:Web or ISYS:SDK. You can use each on its own, except for the Spider.
CommunitySpace: When ISYS scans a document and creates an index, what kind of metadata is held in the index and in what format is it stored?
ID: ISYS handles all metadata in an HTML page. It's not limited to any specific types of metadata. With WordPerfect and Word documents, ISYS manages both standard and user-defined document summary information.
CommunitySpace: Does ISYS index the non-printable "comments" in Word and WordPerfect?
ID: It varies from format to format. The WordPerfect interface is good because it nicely documents everything and formats aren't changed in versions every six months. We can index the text boxes and captions and footnotes etc. Typically, if you can see it when you print it, then ISYS will index it.
CommunitySpace: How does the spider access password-protected sites?
ID: Only by being given the password. The spider can't intrude or illegally enter a password-protected site, in much the same way it can't access, let alone index, the content of a password-protected file. In fact, it can't do anything more than a browser can do.
CommunitySpace: Has your company implemented a KM strategy of its own? If so when and how does it work?
ID: We have a company-wide intranet for our offices. It includes things like basic company data, phone lists, "happy snaps" from our corporate events, brochures, price lists, and message boards where sales and technical people swap bits of knowledge they encounter.
We also accumulate all our tech support call notes into a separate database, and provide a search interface to that so tech people can reuse solved problem solutions. And we have a search interface to our SQL customer database, and some spidered indexes of our competitors' Web sites, so the marketing people can do single searches across our information and theirs.
For our developers, we have built a compound index of our favorite Delphi Web sites, so we can do a single local search that hits all the good Delphi sites and none of the bad ones.
We're also encouraging our sales people to use the Knowledge Warehouse as a place to gather little bits of competitive hearsay that they came across every day. For example, a prospect rings up and says "we were using product xyz, but its pqrs was no good". This is not exactly an in-depth report, but another salesperson can use a useful snippet like that to good effect in a competitive situation.
At an individual level, we all keep every e-mail that has gone in or out, and index our e-mail archives with ISYS. And our WP documents too, of course.