We tested the Dialog Intranet Toolkit on information professionals and a Web administrator. “Straightforward,” “clear,” and “attractive” were the reactions we heard. The Toolkit consists of four integrated tools whose purpose is to help information professionals deliver Dialog content to their intranets, as well as to create an attractive Web site easily using ready-made templates. These templates and the clear, concise directions on how to use them are this product’s forte. Equipped with only an HTML editor, an information professional can create a customized Web site, populate it with Dialog content appropriate for the organization, and create alerts to deliver new current articles. The templates also construct fill-in-the-box search forms so that end users don’t have to know how to use Dialog in order to search it. Links to non-Dialog resources can be added to the Web pages. 

However, easy as the Dialog Intranet Toolkit is to use, it answers only half the requirements we set for a comprehensive intranet tools suite: It delivers Dialog content. Period. [See the “Toolkits Evaluation” sidebar on page 3 for our criteria.] Happily, k-working, another Dialog suite of information tools, will provide the other half of the equation. Dialog tells us k-working is to be integrated with the original Intranet Toolkit using several new technologies developed by Muscat to enable searching of any kind of information source—internal documents, Web sites, PDF files, SQL databases, etc. Dialog has added intelligent agents to keep alerts up-to-date, even when the user’s interests or the terminology changes. This is state-of-the-art information technology. When it is integrated with the Toolkit, information professionals will be able to create a Web site that searches across both Dialog and non-Dialog information sources and presents either a merged or nonmerged set of search results, at your discretion. 

This review covers the Dialog Intranet Toolkit in detail, and then briefly outlines k-working, since a full-blown copy of k-working could not be made available to us in time to test with sample users. However, we did get a look at k-working ourselves. See the end of this article for more on k-working.
 

[Complete article available in print] 

 

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