Resources for KM & SharePoint Portal
1. Building Your First Knowledge Management System - David Goldstein
SharePoint is a great tool to use to build your first knowledge management system. It supports document management, collaboration, and corporate portals. It has many valuable features ‘out-of-the-box’ and it is customizable by developers with knowledge of XML and SQL Server. It is also scalable. You can go from a prototype to an enterprise implementation. A SharePoint web page is made up of web parts. An administrator can build a template by adding, removing or moving out-of-the-box web parts. A developer can create new web parts.
Here is our suggested approach to getting started with your working prototype:
· Construct a ‘team site’ template for your prototype. This template could be used to store and access product information or to share project documents among team members.
· Design a portal to organize your team sites. Focus on making it easy for your users to navigate to the team sites that have the information they need.
· Get feedback on your design then customize. Adding new web parts is more costly than customizing a template. You might want to save this expense until you get some feedback from your users.
URL: http://www.knowledge-management.com/news/v4n2/km.html
2. What is a Knowledge Management System and Why Would I Need One?
In this article, we will describe three knowledge management capabilities that are commonly asked for by our clients and we will discuss how Microsoft’s new knowledge management products (Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2.0) can help organizations meet these needs.
(1) Information Retrieval
The key problem with information retrieval, however, is not technical; it is organizational. Companies must invest in the people and processes to insure that project documents are submitted in a timely manner and that individual expertise pages are updated. All this information must be made easily accessible through search.
In addition, the organization’s taxonomy must be developed and maintained. This taxonomy is the categorization scheme for the documents. New categories must be added as business needs change.
(2) Collaboration
Microsoft’s WSS addresses the collaboration problem. Each project team can have its own project room (called a team portal). All team documents can be accessed through the portal. Document status can be checked, documents can be checked out and checked back in, and a revision history of the document can be viewed.
(3) Portals
Portals are not necessarily part of a knowledge management system. However, many knowledge management systems, including Microsoft SPS have a portal capability.
URL: http://www.knowledge-management.com/news/v3n4/ManagersPerspective.html