Level: Introductory Wendi Pohs, Taxonomy Specialist , Lotus
Dick McCarrick, Content Developer, IBM
01 May 2002 This article describes knowledge management (KM) and its benefits, then focuses on Lotus Discovery Server enhancements in version 2.0, including a revamped K-map user interface and editor and easier installation, setup, and maintenance.
Knowledge Management (KM) is a term
that's been getting quite a workout the last year or two. On one
level, the words are almost self-explanatory. What organization
wouldn't benefit from better managing its collective knowledge? But
many people still have questions about KM. How exactly does it
work? What KM products does Lotus offer? And how can they help my
organization?
This article will help answer these
questions. We'll start by briefly examining KM, what it means and
how it can benefit you. We'll then review the Lotus Discovery
Server, Lotus's KM server offering. Finally, we'll discuss feedback
we've received from our Discovery Server customers, and how we've
responded to this feedback in Release 2.0. Knowledge Management: Well,
what do you know? Few would dispute that knowledge ranks
among an organization's most precious assets-if you can find
it when you need it. But knowledge is not always easy to locate.
Ideally, combined intellect and experience of the entire group
should be readily available to everyone all the time.
With some of the tools available today,
you can search for all the information your organization or the
Internet has collected on a topic, but too often the results are
disappointing. The information is too voluminous, unfocused, or out
of context-or simply too difficult for the average person to
understand. What users really need is experience-the
perspective of someone who has done it before. That experience
could come in the form of a document, or (even better) a person to
whom you can look for assistance. So what's needed is a product
that speeds the knowledge management process in a way that brings
new scalability to the task of analyzing your ever-growing volume
of content. It should also eliminate the need to manually process
and manage knowledge. The Lotus Discovery Server answers these
needs.
The Lotus Discovery Server
primer The Lotus Discovery Server is a
back-end server for managing your organization's knowledge. The
Discovery Server provides sophisticated tools that categorize
documents and user information into browsable and searchable form.
These tools include the following. Knowledge Map, or
K-map The Knowledge Map or K-map (also called
the taxonomy or catalog) is a graphical representation of your
organization's knowledge. It displays a hierarchical set of
categories and documents you can use to find information. The K-map
is the backbone of the Discovery Server search-and-browse user
interface. From the K-map interface, you can locate content from
many disparate sources, by drilling down through subject
categories, using full-text search, or using a combination of both
search strategies. Additional information about the relationships
between people and document activity adds value and context to the
user's search and retrieval experience. Because the K-map displays
related documents, people, and places in categories, users can
browse and search for information in context.
K-map Building
Service The K-map Building Service creates the
K-map, which you can subsequently modify using the K-map Editor
(explained next). The K-map Building Service builds document
categories, creates labels for these categories, and places new
documents into existing categories. It also identifies documents
that do not fit into any existing categories. K-map Editor The K-map Editor is a client
application that lets you fine-tune the K-map to meet the needs of
your organization. Neither the K-map Building Service nor any other
automatic process can predict precisely how an organization wants
to structure its content. It can only build a K-map based on the
words in the content. Once the basic K-map is built, you can use
the K-map Editor to drag categories from one level to the next,
re-label them with preferred terms, and place documents in
different categories. This in turn helps teach Discovery Server how
to categorize documents with similar content in the
future. Profiles Profileshelp identify the right people for the
right job. Profiles collect existing user information from the
directory and other sources, providing a more complete
representation of the users in your organization. Spiders Spiders are multi-threaded processes
that collect data. This data can exist in a number of different
file formats, including:
- XML
- Exchange e-mail and public
folders
- Web content
- Windows-compatible operating system
files
- QuickPlace
- Domino.Doc
- Notes databases and
e-mail
Once the spiders collect this data, the
K-map Building Service processes it to create the
K-map. Metrics Metrics, which is also called
affinities processing, is a computational program that looks at
existing documents and relationships between documents and people.
The metrics component does two things. First, it calculates the
value of a document. Second, it calculates an affinity between a
person and categories, based on the person's interactions with
documents in the categories, which in turn helps produce category
affinities. Other tools Additionally, administration tools let
you install, set up, and maintain Discovery Server, and security
features protect your data. For more information about KM and the
Lotus Discovery Server, see Practical Knowledge Management: The Lotus Knowledge
Discovery System by Wendi
Pohs, which is available from IBM Press.
Customer experiences and feedback Lotus launched Discovery Server 1.0 in
early 2001. Companies adopted Discovery Server to help manage their
corporate knowledge, especially when they had an immediate
informational problem to solve. But as with any new product in a
leading-edge technology, there was a lot to be learned as
organizations began to implement Discovery Server and use it in
many different ways-some expected, some
unexpected. For example, we initially assumed that
once users manually categorize documents, they would want these
categorizations to "stick" and not be further modified by Discovery
Server. So when automatically updating a K-map, the K-map Building
Service ignored all documents that had been manually categorized.
However, we soon learned users wanted help in creating
subcategories, especially when a category grew so large that it
became difficult to use. So in Discovery Server 2.0, the K-map
Building Service now processes manually categorized
documents. Customers demanded a more open, less
"black box" approach. In response, we're providing more detailed
administration functionality and interface. We're also opening the
Discovery Server API, to allow more customization. Users also want
the ability to import an existing operating system file/folder
taxonomy into Discovery Server and display it as a
K-map. Early Discovery Server adopters also
requested improved metrics reporting (particularly for information
trends and knowledge gap analysis), better automatic profile
creation (to avoid re-keying data that already exists, for example
in a Person document in the Domino Directory), and better metadata
handling (for instance, more accurate connections between documents
and their authors). In Discovery Server 2.0, we've attempted to
respond to all key points in this feedback.
What's new in Discovery Server 2.0? So what's new in Lotus Discovery Server
2.0? The remainder of this article discusses the new features and
functionality we'll be introducing in Lotus Discovery Server 2.0
Highlights include:
- A revamped architecture for the
K-map user interface and editor, with more accessibility and better
display of search results
- Improved "people awareness" for
Profiles
- Better spider support for
Domino.Doc and QuickPlace content
- Enhanced control over metrics
processing
- Easier installation, setup, and
maintenance
- Better logging
K-map: Improved interface, expanded
features The 2.0 K-map offers a user interface
that features a new servlet-based architecture. This gives you more
scalability and better performance. Other K-map enhancements
include accessibility, improved display of search results,
bookmarking, and better support for opening the most appropriate
replica of Notes databases. Easier-to-use, more accessible
interface The new K-map user interface consists
of two main tabs, Browse and Search, and Search Results. In
addition, a new URL-addressable page appears for all the following
actions:
- Browse to a new
category
- Perform a search
- Navigate to a different tab within
the same set of search results
- Perform a refined
search
- Navigate between sets of iterated
search results
- Page through a set of list
results
- Sort a list
Each page that appears as a result of
these actions is put on the browser history, so you can return to
it via the Back/Forward buttons in the browser interface. You can
also bookmark these pages. Lotus is also committed to offering an
accessible interface for Discovery Server. This includes supporting
all functionality with consistent and simple keyboard navigation of
Discovery Server controls, fields, and hyperlinks. We will also aid
low-vision users by:
- Providing enhanced color contrast
in the standard interface design
- Supporting the Windows "High
Contrast" palette schemes in the Appearance tab of the Control
Panel - Display settings
- Supporting user-defined font
settings in both the operating system and the browser
Other K-map user interface features
introduced in 2.0 include:
- K-map search results offer People
summaries in search results. We've also added a "Go to K-map
Category" link to the summary of each document in search
results.
- Supported documents types include
documents stored in Exchange public folders. Discovery Server 2.0
also offers better handling of Notes attachments, OLE embeddings,
Domino.Doc documents and QuickPlace documents.
- Bookmarking lets you bookmark
(whether from the Search or Browse page) and have Discovery Server
save both the Browse state and the Search parameters.
- Saving state maintains a single
saved state so that whenever you access the K-map from a particular
computer, the interface is configured exactly as it was the last
time you logged in. In response to customer feedback, the K-map no
longer returns you to the category you were in when you last closed
the K-map. This helps improve performance. Key information saved
through this feature includes:
- Document and People List heights in Browse and Search
- Column order, in Document and People Lists in Browse and Search;
and on Document, People, and Category tabs in Search Results
- Sort order in Document and People Lists in Browse and
Search
- Column widths, in Document and People Lists in Browse and Search;
and on Document, People, and Category tabs in Search Results
- Summaries on/off, in Document and People Lists in Browse and
Search; and on Document, People, and Category tabs in Search
Results
K-map Editor The K-map Editor interface now lets you
display a special K-map Editor accessible Reports view. This lets
you create, schedule, and delete two new reports to aid your
editing. These reports show both the number of documents per
category, subtotaled per branch, and the documents that are new to
a category (having been added automatically or
manually). Another new K-map Editor feature is
category visibility. This option allows you to keep categories
hidden until they are ready to be viewed by your users. Then when
you publish a category, it becomes visible to end users via the
K-map interface, as long as its parent categories are also
published. (New categories assume the visibility of their parent by
default.) Note that hiding a category does not prevent users from
seeing the documents in that category if they are returned via
K-map search. However, it does prevent you from getting affinities
to that category. To make it easier to optimize
taxonomies, Discovery Server 2.0 offers two new options, Request
Subdivide and Request Retrain. Request Subdivide tells the K-map
Building Service to divide the selected category into
subcategories. When you select this option, the K-map Building
Service attempts to create these subcategories, based on the total
number of documents in the category (and the maximum number of
documents per category you specified). If the K-map Building
Service determines it can create two or more subcategories with
reasonable fit values (and fairly evenly distributed documents), it
moves documents from the specified category to the new
subcategories, leaving the original category empty. If the selected
category can't be usefully subcategorized, the K-map Building
Service returns an error message. Request Retrain helps "teach" the K-map
Building Service how to categorize documents the way you want.
After you manually move documents into a category, this option
tells the K-map Building Service to place new documents with
similar content into this category in the future. You can retrain
selected categories, or the entire K-map taxonomy. Other K-map Editor enhancements include
an icon that indicates whether documents will launch in their
native application or in the browser, a set Document Status options
to set status for selected documents to locked or unlocked, and a
Doc Counts option that displays the number of documents per
category K-map Building
Service In response to user demand, we've made
the K-map Building Service smarter when handling categorization.
For example, in Discovery Server 1.0, if you manually moved a
document into a category, K-map Building Service automatically
assumed you wanted it to remain there forever, even if the category
grew so big it required subcategorization to navigate properly. It
would never change the categorization of this document. In
Discovery Server 2.0, the K-map Building Service is free to
subcategorize these documents as appropriate. By default, all categories created by
the K-map Building Service are hidden, so you can review them prior
to making the categories available to users. You can also import an existing file
system taxonomy and use it as the basis for your K-map. To do this,
Discovery Server 2.0 lets you import the file/folder document
taxonomy from your operating system. You can then use the K-map
Editor to modify the taxonomy into the K-map you want.
Profiles: Who's available now Profiles include enhanced people
awareness, the ability to determine the on-line status of selected
members of your organization. We've also upgraded Person profile
documents, which now include a more accessible
interface. People awareness People awareness incorporates Sametime
functionality to transform passive name references into dynamic
resources. These provide information about the person's current
on-line status. Directly from the name reference, you can contact
the person, find out more about them, and initiate other
application-specific commands.
When you log on Discovery Server 2.0
(either via the K-map or though a profile), you automatically log
on to the Sametime server. Then anywhere your name appears within
Discovery Server, other users will be able to tell you are on-line.
Additionally, wherever they see your name displayed in K-map or in
a profile, a Sametime status icon appears to indicate your on-line
status. (If you don't have a Sametime server specified in your
Domino Directory Person document, Discovery Server assumes Sametime
is not available and doesn't display your on-line
status.) People awareness lets you identify your
most knowledgeable people in a particular area, and then contact
them immediately by initiating a Sametime dialog. This is
especially useful when you need immediate information or need a
question answered in real-time. Person profiles We've given Person profile documents a
new servlet-based interface, to ensure the same "look-and-feel" as
K-map. This also gives you better support for text resizing using
your browser's View - Text Size commands. We've also made the
Person profile interface more accessible. One Discovery Server customer request
is the ability to see all names the user is known by throughout the
system. So at the bottom of the Contact Information page, we've
added a new field called "Other user names." We've also made some changes to the
Affinities interface. We've moved the interface for approving
proposed affinities into the profile document. For example, if
there are proposed affinities, they appear in a table within the
profile document. (Note that if you approve proposed affinities but
then cancel out of the profile document without saving it, the
approvals are also cancelled.) And in response to other user feedback,
we display the "Declaring Affinities" description in Read Mode on
the Affinities page if the person viewing the profile document has
edit rights.
Spiders: Better support for Domino.Doc and
QuickPlace Discovery Server 2.0 supports spidering
Domino.Doc and QuickPlace documents. We've also enhanced other
spiders, such as the one for Notes/Domino, and added a spider for
Exchange. Domino.Doc spider We offer spidering for both Domino.Doc
3.1 and 3.0. Capabilities include:
- Documents and their attachments are
treated as single documents.
- A Domino.Doc repository is defined
at the File Cabinet level.
- Forum (discussion) docs are
spidered.
- There is an administration option
to spider all, or only latest versions.
- Domino.Doc-specific field mapping
is spidered.
- There is support for archived
documents.
QuickPlace spider We also support spidering for
QuickPlace 2.0.6a and 2.0.8. Capabilities include:
- A QuickPlace repository defined at
the Main.nsf level.
- Embedded pages are treated as one
entity.
- QuickPlace-specific field mapping
is spidered.
Handling documents with
attachments Spiders in Discovery Server 2.0 have
improved the handling of documents that do not contain text but do
contain one or more attachments. These so-called "sparse container"
documents will be classified with their attachments. The title of
the attachment identifies the sparse container
document.
Metrics: More detailed and easier to
understand Metrics now consists of four separate
services: Profile Maintenance, Metrics Reporting, Affinity
Processing, and Metrics Processing. These comprised a single
service in Discovery Server 1.0; we separated them in response to
user demand for a less "black box" approach to Metrics. All four
services can only run on one server at a time; but you can move
them from one server to another, and schedule them
individually.
- Profile Maintenance processes user
edits to profile documents.
- Metrics Reporting creates Metrics
reports.
- Metrics Processing computes
document values, updates the Discovery Server data with new
affinities and new document values, and updates full-text search
with new values.
- Affinity Processing calculates
affinities, proposes and publishes affinities, sends affinity
e-mails, and updates profile documents with affinities. This
service provides more control over when affinities are
generated.
Installation, setup, and maintenance: More customer
control Discovery Server 2.0 offers
significantly enhanced administration functionality. This lets you
have greater control over installation, setup, and maintenance. And
you'll have a better idea of what's going on "under the hood" of
Discovery Server. Installation The installation dialog box now
includes numerous checks and warnings to better guide you through
installing and upgrading. Also, we no longer install the K-map
Editor with the server. We have discovered that in practice,
installing the K-map Editor on the server is rarely
done-usually only for demo purposes. We also modified the Admin Name &
Password screen to let you provide your own username. This can be
an account already defined on the system or created on the fly if
one doesn't exist. Setup In Release 2.0, we re-worked the setup
screens to be easier and more intuitive. This includes better input
validation and error messages. Maintenance As a response to customer requests for
more control over Discovery Server (and to accommodate new features
introduced in Release 2.0), we have incorporated new administration
functionality. For example, we made the interface for enabling the
XML spider always visible, instead of requiring you to set an INI
variable to do this. We've also added a new interface for
replicating K-map data to a secondary server. This includes a
"K-map Replication" checkbox in the Server document on the primary
Discovery Server, as well as a "K-map Replica" checkbox in the
Server document of Secondary Discovery Servers. After you check
this option and save the Server document, replication will copy the
K-map data from the primary to the specified secondary servers.
These secondaries can then serve end-users, helping you balance
user workload among several machines. Other maintenance features
include:
- A new interface for enabling the
Exchange spider
- A drill-down model to support large
numbers of repositories
- Better "paging" capability in
multi-page views and logs
- The ability to move Metrics
processing from one server to another
- Improved interface for choosing
repositories for creating the K-map
- Updates to Service Status
views
Logging We've improved logging messages to be
more informative. For example, the K-Map Building log has been
significantly enhanced, with more logging of editor activities. And
to keep you better appraised as QuickPlace and Domino.Doc spiders
run, we provide a new message type to enable these spiders to post
interim begin/end messages as each room/binder is
processed.
Other enhancements Discovery Server 2.0 API
Toolkit As mentioned earlier, users have asked
for a more open approach. To meet this need, we're providing a
complete Discovery Server API Toolkit. This allows you to customize
Discovery Server to suit your organization's exact requirements.
Third-party software developers will also use this Toolkit to
develop their own solutions based on Discovery Server
functionality. Data repositories Discovery Server 2.0 includes many new
features to better manage your data repositories. For example, you
can temporarily prevent a repository from being spidered, and have
it start up again later, without disabling the spider. You can then
have the repository requeued automatically. You can also stop
spidering a repository (for instance, because you made a mistake in
defining it), delete it, and start over with new parameters. Other
new data repository functionality include:
- Preventing two repository records
from pointing to the same source
- Supporting a "delete and make new
copy" action from the main Repositories view
- Providing the ability to unqueue a
repository
- An interface for spidering Exchange
e-mail and Public Folders
- Options for traversing Domino.Doc
and QuickPlace hierarchy
- Options for spidering Domino.Doc
and QuickPlace revisions
- The ability to edit Field Map
fields after the repository has been queued/spidered
And we've added an interface for
specifying a subset of repository data to be spidered, per customer
request. Field mapping Our goal in this release is to only map
what the administrator selects to map-in other words, what
you define in the profile forms. This means there will be no
"identity mapping" (automatically mapping a field name in the
source to the same field name in the profile document). Also in
Release 2.0, we provide better coverage for well-known data
mappings in the default data field map ($Global). People sources New features in this area
include:
- An interface to specify "Process
all documents during next run"
- An interface to associate
supplemental sources with all or some subset of authoritative
sources
- Support for additional LDAP search
parameters BASEDN and SCOPE
Documentation Discovery Server 2.0 documentation
includes a Deployment Guide, available shortly after product ship.
This should be a must-read before a customer site begins to install
and implement Discovery Server.
Going forward A director of research at a major
automotive firm recently stated, "If we just knew what we know,
this organization would be 30 percent more profitable." Lotus
Discovery Server helps you move forward toward such goals. Through
the years, members of your organization have conducted business,
written documents, contributed to online discussion forums. In the
process, they've created a collective body of information of
ever-increasing value. Discovery Server 2.0 helps you make sense of
it all. Less time is wasted spent looking for the person who knows
about a particular subject, or locating the information you need.
Your best assets are accessible to all, enabling employees to
better meet the demands and expectations of their jobs. This in
turn helps form high-performing teams-and your corporation
performs better as a whole.
Resources
About the authors  | | | Wendi Pohs is a principal taxonomy specialist on the Discovery Server team and the author of a book about knowledge management methodologies, Practical Knowledge Management: The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System, published by IBM Press. Wendi joined Lotus Development Corporation in 1996 and has worked on various projects as a spec writer, online help designer, and user assistance manager. Prior to joining Lotus, Wendi worked at the American Mathematical Society and at Digital Equipment Corporation. Wendi received her BA and MILS degrees from the University of Michigan. |
| | | Dick McCarrick is a content developer for developerWorks: Lotus. Previously he was a member of the Domino/Notes Documentation team for over 11 years, playing a variety of roles in documenting many major components of Domino and Notes. He also wrote the occasional article for Iris Today (including Ask Professor INI) before joining the Notes.net/Lotus Developer Domain team permanently in 2002. In his spare time, Dick's leisure activities include running, fishing, woodworking, and reading about the natural sciences. An avid astronomer, he's former director of the Bridgewater (Mass.) State College Observatory. Dick lives in Vermont. |
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