Bill Cave of Entopia briefed me on Entopia's Pillar 7 platform. Entopia offers what it calls "information discovery infrastructure", which includes expertise location, content visualization (the automatic generation of a visual map of terms and the linkages between them), social network analysis, and enterprise search. Entopia K-Bus presents a portal-style interface for searching and subsequent navigation through search results.
Here's my notes from the session:
- The platform searches through multiple data repositories inside and outside of the enterprise. Search connectors are available for integration with Oracle and Microsoft databases, CRM systems (eg, Salesforce.com and Siebel), file servers, Web sites, content management systems (eg, SharePoint, Documentum, and Livelink, among others), email systems (eg, Exchange and Domino), and others. Confidential email messages will be ignored by Entopia. If the customer wants to integrate with something that Entopia doesn't support out-of-the-box, then a new connector can be developed.
- Entopia natively supports five international languages, and is considering how to support Japanese, Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. I suggested a partnership with an internationalization firm, such as TRADOS
- Search results can be rendered within the Entopia interface, or opened in their native application for subsequent editing and workflow enablement. This provides a quick way of seeing what a document is about without being forced to open the native application directly.
- There is no integration for presence or messaging with enterprise instant messaging platforms today. When experts are identified, users can send email or call by phone, but are not able from within the Entopia interface to see their presence and availability, nor to initiate an IM conversation. Bill indicated that those capabilities are coming in the next release, although the details are still being finalized.
- Users can save searches for regular review, and can subscribe for email notification. It would be good to offer notification by RSS too ... moving the stream of notification messages out of email and into an RSS client instead.
- The content visualization capabilities are great. Users can search on a term of interest, and immediately see other terms and phrases of direct relationship. The K-Map is interactive, meaning that users can click through to related topics. It's a good way for expanding someone's view into what is going on within the enterprise.
- Entopia's customers include the US Navy, SAAB, Intel, The George Washington University, and SPAWAR.
Do You Use Entopia?
Do you utilize Entopia within your environment? What benefits have you realized for your people? What capabilities would you like to see added? Please leave a comment below, or email Michael.
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