About Knowledge Repository

Knowledge is one of an organization's most valuable assets. It drives and influences decisions. It fuels innovation. It can provide a competitive advantage. It enables people to do their job. Organizations maintain knowledge in a variety of ways; from files, databases, wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and Web pages stored in digital formats on servers, laptops, CD's and thumb drives to printed marketing collateral, documentation, reports, and books. Sometimes an organization's most valuable knowledge resides in the minds of the people it employs.

Challenge

The different ways that knowledge can be stored and shared can make it difficult for team members to find all the information they might need for a project. An organization's digitally stored information is usually distributed among multiple storage repositories, often making it difficult for those who need to find it or access it.

Hundreds of thousands of an organization's information files might be stored on individuals' desktops and laptops, inaccessible to others who might need that information. Often a large percentage of an organization's information lies scattered among thousands and thousands of users' e-mails, whether as attachments, in the body of an e-mail or discussion threads that span several e-mails. Not only is this information inaccessible to those not included in the e-mail threads, but specific points of information in a specific e-mail can be difficult to locate for even someone who has that e-mail buried in their inbox. Of course, if an e-mail containing important knowledge inadvertently gets deleted – or deliberately after a certain period of time – that knowledge becomes lost forever.

Even information stored in a central location can be difficult to access. Sometimes the difficulty arises simply because the organization doesn't have search tools in place to help users sift through hundreds of thousands of files. Also, while firewalls and other security mechanisms help protect an organization's valuable digital assets stored on their servers, those same security measures can make it difficult for mobile or remote users to access the information they need when they need it.

Organizational turnover also creates challenges in the form of both knowledge retention and knowledge access. Business-critical information can be lost every time an employee retires or leaves the organization. Even though it's best to try to capture employee information before the employee leaves an organization, that's not always easy or possible. Often this is simply because not everything an employee knows is written on paper or stored on a computer. Many of today's tools don't encourage or make it easy for people to record or contribute their gained knowledge. Still, even when a person has stored their information before leaving the organization, it's not always easy to find needed information due to individual styles and preferences for storing and organizing information.

Accessibility difficulties that afflict both centralized and distributed information often result from the inadequate or improper use of metadata. To be usable or searchable, some information files require supplementary metadata such as creator/author, purpose, time and date of creation, creation standards used, and more. Since different types of documents might have different metadata requirements, it can be a challenge to capture or maintain the required metadata.

Additionally, not all digital information exists in the form of files. Wikis, Web pages, blogs, discussion forums, list servers, and instant messaging conversations represent just a few information formats beyond standard user files. The content of all of these different information formats often resides on different systems or platforms, which are managed separately and secured in different manners. With so many different information tools, formats, and storage methods, organizations face a constant struggle of enabling their people to securely access and leverage the information they need to do their jobs and help the business succeed.

Novell Solution

Novell Vibe facilitates an organization's ability to preserve, manage, and make accessible the information that team members need to be highly efficient and productive. Documents, conversations, and communal knowledge relevant to specific teams are all stored in a single, secure workspace or set of workspaces where existing and new team members can access them at any time.

Project leaders and team members can leverage Novell Vibe workspaces to store, organize and share all information related to a specific project, including documents, media files, ideas, plans, research, milestones, tasks, expected outcomes, work in progress, and more. Novell Vibe enables teams to digitally connect data from different collaboration sources—including wikis, blogs, forums, e-mail, calendars, documents, and Web pages—and aggregate relevant information based on the needs of a specific project.

Novell Vibe makes it easy to find the relevant knowledge and resources that team members need. They can easily navigate through the system to contextually see how projects and other collections of information relate to each other. To enable this, Novell Vibe adds a layer of metadata to published data that establishes contextual links among relevant pieces of information. It also fosters contextual interactions among people and their ideas, research, work, and knowledge.

Additionally, the knowledge retention and sharing capabilities inherent in Novell Vibe can help ensure that the collective knowledge of any skilled group is never lost, and is always available to the organization. When someone leaves the group—or the organization—that knowledge doesn't sit on a hard drive that could be re-imaged at any moment. It's right where it should be—in the team workspace— where existing and new team members can access it at any time.

Results

Novell Vibe makes it easy for users and teams to contribute, share and find the relative expertise and knowledge needed for agile, efficient, high performing teams while preserving that knowledge long after its original contributors have either left the team or the organization. Through the use of secure workspaces, Novell Vibe provides a centralized location to store a wide variety of information and document types, including wikis, blogs, Office files, OpenOffice files, PDFs, landing pages, discussion forums, mirrored folders, calendars, tasks, image libraries, and more. Information stored in Novell Vibe can be securely searched and accessed without the need for the native application that was used to create the file. Novell Vibe provides users better access to organizational knowledge, enabling them to make better decisions, fuel innovation, do their jobs, and drive business success.