Boston KM Forum Meeting — March 15, 2007

I went to an interesting session of the Boston KM Forum last night. The presenter was Marc Solomon from PRTM, and the topic was Enterprise Deployment: Warts and All (A Working Session on Intranet Development).  Marc talked about the journey it took to implement PRTM’s SharePoint 2003-based KM system.  He had many insights on what worked and didn’t, and why.

Marc showed us several things that I plan to look into more.

• TextSTAT — This free software from the Free University of Berlin analyzes text files and and produces word frequency lists and concordances.  Marc showed how he uses TextSTAT to analyze the search logs from the KM system to understand what people are searching for.  This enables him to enhance the system structure, the best bets, and the taxonomy of the site.
• NextPage — Marc only mentioned this, but NextPage seems to extend document management from the server to the desktop.  Interesting ideas, and worth a look.
• Coveo Search — I’ve seen Coveo in action before, but Marc’s demonstration of the PRTM implementation reinforced how powerful and useful it is.