Knowledge Management Expo was held at Chicago's McCormick Place Lakeside facility from October 13-15, 1998. Concurrently, the Delphi Group's Empower '98 Conference was being held. This show and conference covered the entire spectrum of Knowledge Management - Document and Information Management, Workflow and Business Process Reengineering. This article describes some of the new and interesting products announced and displayed at this trade show.

eRoom screen
Instinctive Technology introduced their newest version of eRoom, version 3.0, which allows team members to collaborate, coordinate and manage projects. Shipping in November 1998, e-Room appears to be an alternative to workgroup services. Requires NT (Server or workstation) for server running IIS (server) or PWS (workstation). ($4,995 for server and $199 per seat. A 50 user version, with server software, maintenance and training is $12,995.)

Beehive screen
Beehive, currently in beta, is the first product from Abuzz. Using email as the vehicle, it helps employees to get better answers to their questions, using expertise of other employees. Management also stays informed about which employees help answer questions, in a constructive manner, and what questions go unanswered. Final release is expected to be shipping during first quarter 1999.

KnowMail Screen
kinetoscope demonstrated their new product which has a low cost of $50 per seat which captures knowledge lost in corporate email transmissions by allowing email submissions to a knowledge repository which can be queried. Agents can be set up which watch for information of interest. Written in 100% Pure Java, KnowMail supports NT, Solaris and Linux servers. It also has JDBC compatibility with SQL Server and Oracle.

Panasonic KV-S6040W Flatbed
Production Scanner
Available on December 1st, 1998, the Panasonic KV-S6040W is a 40 PPM (200 dpi) single sided scanner with a 200 page feeder and sells for $4,995. It can scan checks to ledger sized documents, is ISIS certified and has a SCSI-II interface. A Duplex version (KV-S6045W) is also available at $7,995.

David Martin, CEO (left) and Tom Fukushima, Senior Project Leader (right) of SMART Technologies Inc.

SMART Technologies introduced (shipping in November 1998) SMART Ideas, a graphical groupware product which helps local or remote team members collaborate visually. Meeting room members can work with SMART Ideas on a computer or see the ideas unfold on a SMART Board (interactive whiteboard), while remote users see the same ideas, in real-time, on their computers. Instead of merely presenting the same poor, hand drawn graphics to the entire meeting (as few people can draw well freehand), using this software with a SMART Board transforms these hastily drawn circles, boxes, lines and even text into a good looking diagram in seconds! The SMART Board is like a huge pen computer and when connected to a SMART Ideas server, the screen is readable throughout the world. With the SMART Ideas client and the NT server software, written in Java, development of this product took over one year, under Senior Project Leader, Tom Fukushima. The team had as many as 7 developers on the project at one time. (The server software starts at $250 per user for a 4 user version. Standalone software starts at $149.)

Destiny 4.0 Screen
Destiny 4.0 is available from Centillion Digital as a $30,000 package or as a $25,000 per year service. It is a web based, enterprise wide tool for digital asset archiving and distribution and supports over 30 different file formats including image, text audio and video. It runs on both UNIX and NT servers and is written in JavaScript, VB Script, HTML and C++.

Joel Bauer, Infotainer, at Hyland booth
Joel Bauer entertained and mystified attendees at the Hyland booth. Hyland was demonstrating OnBase, an integrated client/server application which helps manage access to documents. Selling only through the reseller channel, Hyland offers a six-month money back guarantee.

Ice Sculpture at Fujitsu's i-Flow Party
Fujitsu Software announced that they are shipping i-Flow, a web-centric process automation software platform. This Java based product is available for $25,000 for 25 profiled users and $50,000 for 100 profiled users. It is scaleable up to 10,000 profiled users and runs on NT and Solaris.

Copyright © 1998 Rick Smith All rights reserved.