Doug Cornelius .com

Although tagging and the folksonomy the tags create have interested me, I have a hard time figuring out how they would work inside a law firm.

Sure it would be great to allow users to add tags to pages on our intranet or other web-based applications. It would also be valuable to compile tags for external websites that would be useful to the practice.

But the vast majority of our knowledge artifacts are documents in our Interwoven Worksite document management system. Interwoven does not have a way to tag. If I can’t tag my documents, then I might as well not have enterprise tags at all.

Sure, you can add comments and profile fields to the document in Interwoven. But that is not the same thing. Since you can only have one profile, you can only have one tag set per document. You also do not get the attribution. If I do not know who made the tag, I am less likely to rely on it. The tag has much more value when you know who made it.

Collecting and displaying tags by person then turns the tags into a person’s expertise and areas of interest. If you look at my Del.icio.us tags you can see what I found interesting. My tags are in the lower right corner of the website.

One of the interesting tools that Vivisimo has apparently packaged with the new release of its Velocity search tool is the ability to tag documents in Worksite. Actually, it should give you the ability to tag any knowledge artifact in any system you connect to the Vivisimo enterprise search tool.

The tagging in Vivisimo gives you ability to enhance the findability of the knowledge artifacts inside the law firm and find out more about the people inside the law firm.

Way back in June, I sat through (and enjoyed) a presentation by David Weinberger at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As a result I put his book, Everything is Miscellaneous on my reading list. Having just finished reading the book, I was pleased to stumble across a video of his presentation.

It is great presentation and book to provoke thought about how you organize your knowledge. If you have a free hour, watch the whole video. If you only have a few minutes, watch the first few minutes.

As a follow up to my post on Connectbeam, Chuck Pendell VP of Sales and Puneet Gupta CEO and Founder of Connectbeam spent some time showing me their product in more detail.

They are positioning the product as a social software application for information access and discovery. The goal is to provide good content by adding attributes to make the information more useful. It ends up being a blend of del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn within the enterprise.

The Connectbeam appliance combines social bookmarking with social networking. It uses bookmarking as a proxy for expertise and information interest. So if I have a bunch of bookmarks on “knowledge management,” I presumably have some expertise in knowledge management or at least have some interest in knowledge management.

The product is an appliance so it should be easy to deploy and setup. It allows each user to import bookmarks from del.icio.us or a web browser. When you add a bookmark, you can decide to make it open, publish it to an open community, publish it to a restricted community or keep it private. They provide a toolbar with the button to create the bookmark and add the tags.

They also allow an integration into an internet and/or intranet search. Then the tagging from Connectbeam is combined with the search results. In the demo they used their Google appliance search, combining intranet and internet web search into a single result set. The bookmarked websites with the tags that matched the search terms were presented first in the search results, pushing those sites that were bookmarked the most to the top of the search results.

The community aspect of Connectbeam allows you to create ad hoc communities that are either open or restricted. I could create a community for my knowledge management team and publish bookmarks to that community. I could keep the community open so that anyone in firm interested in knowledge management could see the bookmarks published to that community. Or I could keep it restricted so that only certain invited people could join the community and see that community of bookmarks and their tags.

Connectbeam associates each person’s bookmarks and communities and produces a user profile based on that information. I really like the concept of the tagging information being added into the profile for a person.

I see a tremendous value in adding the bookmarks and tags to enhance search results. It is a great way to cull out good content. If someone went through the trouble of bookmarking and tagging a site, it has some higher value for them. By combining multiple users bookmarks and tags, the better content bubbles to the top of the search results. In return, each person has a catalog of their bookmarks to browse and search through.

With Connectbeam the bookmarking and tagging enhance the findability of information used by the enterprise and the findability of expertise within the enterprise.

The weakness of the Connectbeam system is that it relies on bookmarking. Therefore you need a discoverable, unique URL to create the bookmark. For my firm, that ends up leaving out our document management system. Without being able to pull in documents it ends up not being a good solution for my firm. Maybe they can create an integration with Interwoven, but in the meantime the value proposition for Connectbeam is less apparent for my firm.

Connectbeam has announced the launch of version 2.0 of their social computing appliance. It looks like an interesting approach to get social bookmarking and social networking inside the enterprise. They have a 5 minute tour of the product.

It is great that the Connectbeam tagging and social bookmarking includes websites both inside and outside the firewall. We need to increasingly be aware that lots of great content and information lives outside our firewalls and should be incorporated as part of an enterprise knowledge base/search.

The problem I have with Connectbeam is getting it integrated with our document management system. Without that content most of our firm’s internal content would be missing from the Connectbeam system. They have connectors to Google’s search appliance, FAST search and Transfer’s FSP search engine. None of these have been shown to integrate well with our document management system

I do like their Live Profiles, that dynamically reflects a person’s area of interest and expertise. As you tag information, those tags get reflected in your profile. As you join groups, that group information gets shown on your profile.