Mart Muller's Weblog

It’s been a while since my last post and no, I’ve not been on vacation . We’ve been working the last few weeks on the Tam Tam Knowledgebrowser, a SharePoint application for enhancing knowledge management.

Ferry already posted the idea and concept for this application on his blog yesterday. To summarize:

“The Knowledge Browser is a customized knowledge base for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 that accommodates high-level navigating through a large collection of information by means of metadata.“

…

“One of the major advantages of SharePoint is that you can store various kinds of information (documents, lists, links and discussions) and establish relevant properties (metadata) to describe these information items for future retrieval. Unfortunately, the user interface of SharePoint 2003 doesn’t make much use of this metadata yet for high-level navigation. Metadata is mainly used in the search function and on the lowest navigation level (inside a list or document library).

In practice, a search function is mainly used in ‘known item searching’: you know exactly what you are looking for and you can enter an accurate query to retrieve the information. Navigation is used more in ‘topic searching’: you want to explore a topic, not really sure what you will find. Or you just can’t remember the exact title of a topic but you do know in which field to look for it.”

…

“Key features:

Users can explore the knowledge base by using the main taxonomies topics, events, people (more will be added in the next version), the alphabetical index or the search function.
The Knowledge Browser supports various types of information, for instance documents, articles, multimedia files, referrals to books or online resources, people and events.
Information can be posted on multiple topics. Topics cross-link to other relevant topics.
Users can narrow down result lists by using filters.
The search function automatically translates alternative terms (synonyms, abbreviations) and common misspellings to preferred terms, for more relevant results.
Users can subscribe to RSS-feeds with the latest contributions to the knowledge base. There are topic-specific feeds and an aggregated feed.
The Knowledge Browser supports four roles: knowledge manager, super-user, contributor and reader. Readers consume, contributors and super-users share their knowledge (and consume) and knowledge managers own the topics and approve new contributions.
Many settings are configurable, like approval on/off, max. number of results per page.

Other features have been planned for future releases. These include:

Support for online discussions;
Targeting information to specific audiences;
Alternative contribution methods, e.g. directly from MS Word, a webpage or an e-mail;
Logging user activity;
Richer, more intuitive user interface.”

So, what the Knowledgebrowser basically is, is a user interface on a topic structure for enhancing knowledge management in SPS 2003.

Technically, I personally don’t like huge customizations on the SharePoint platform. By creating any dependancies and ‘rebuilding’ default SharePoint functionality the platform will loose its scalability and upgradeability a lot. The Tam Tam Knowledgebrowser only uses default SharePoint Portal Server functionality when looking at the technical implementation. This way, it can (and will be in the future) be packaged as a product very easily and will scale-up within the organisation it is implemented in.

The current version also inlcudes a ‘Setup’ webpart that creates all the underlying structures, lists and webparts automatically. This version was deployed at one of our customers yesterday, which was basically a matter of pushing the button ‘create beautiful knowledge management solution!’.