In its May 15th, 2000 issue, KMWorld Online [www.kmworld.com] lists those 100 Companies Who Matter in KM [http://www.kmworld.com/100.cfm]. It’s a list worth looking at and following, as KMWorld says it will be discussing these companies during coming months. Two things intrigued us about this list: first, that some of the companies we’ve pursued—or will be—are listed here, including the free Intranets.com reviewed in the May/June 2000 issue, and SageMaker, to be reviewed in September/October. It’s always nice to know when you’re on the right track! Second, a number of the companies on the list are closely related to the information profession, including Teltech [www.teltech.com], RoweCom [www.rowe.com], Open Text [www.opentext.com], and Northern Light [www.northernlight.com]. The lines continue to blur between professions, disciplines, and companies, while new ventures, markets, and disciplines continue to emerge.

One field that’s emerging is information architecture (IA). Reporting from the ASIS Summit 2000, Andy Breeding summarizes the discussions defining IA and its directions. By all accounts a resounding success, this IA conference spawned an ASIS discussion group (sigia-l) with around 400 subscribers, and ASIS has established a Special Interest Group (SIG) and a Web site [http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2000/Information_Architecture/presentations.html]. What interested us most was a conference attendee’s job title, “Goddess of Information Architecture.” Perhaps there are others out there with the job title Portal Princess or Prince? 

In our continuing quest to shed light on intranet toolkits, we describe how Margie Pace, manager of the Business Information Resource Center at Blue Cross/Blue Shield Florida, is using LEXIS-NEXIS’ Smart Tools. Margie graciously took the time to discuss their work in selecting, implementing, and optimizing this toolkit. It’s not often that we unearth a good news story like this, in which the client is very pleased with the vendor’s approach and product. Even as we were wrapping up this feature, Margie told us her LEXIS-NEXIS information professional consultant, an MLS with many years experience, had been working on site for 2 days revising pre-set searches to enhance and refine the results. It should be noted that subscribers of LEXIS-NEXIS Universe are not charged for this Smart Tools support and customization of pre-set searches.

Very aware that not everyone has staff to devote to intranet issues, or a large IT department to co-opt, we asked Tim Tripp to write about intranet approaches for information professionals flying solo.

It doesn’t look like this is going to be a long, lazy summer. Developments are rapidly unfolding in the content, intranet, and portal markets, and vendors don’t plan on slowing these for several months. As we go to print, Factiva [www.factiva.com] has just announced it is a flagship member in Oracle’s Portal Partners Initiative [www.oracle. com], along with Ernst & Young [www.ey.com], Autonomy [www.autonomy.com], EDS [www.eds.com], InfoSpace [www.infospace.com], ISyndicate [www.isyndicate.com], Net Perceptions [www.netperceptions.com], SiteScape [www.sitescape.com], Verity [www.verity.com], and WebEx [www.webex.com]. Clients will have the option of working with all or some of these partners to obtain the content and applications for their enterprise portals built on the Oracle Enterprise Portal framework. This isn’t the first bundling of this type, nor will it be the last. This fall we expect to be discussing how information professionals are taking advantage of more partnerships and product options for integrating content into their organizations’ infrastructures and their clients’ work processes. See you in September!
 

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