Last month, Knowledge Plaza got awarded with the “Innovation Award in Knowledge Management” at the event I-EXPO/KM Forum (Paris), which yearly gathers information and knowledge management experts and practitioners (business intelligence, librarians, etc.) -that is ca. 6,000 visitors and 150 exhibitors.

The two other nominees for this award were:

• Pikko with Arak for Wiki
• Sinequa with Sinequa Enterprise Search 7

This award coincides with the launch of Knowledge Plaza for SMEs (online payment starting as of 35€/month) and with the opening of our new offices in Paris (fyi, our headquarters are located in Mont St. Guibert -Belgium- even though many customers are now located in France).

In 2009, during our first participation, we already had the honor of being counted among the finalists for the award, but getting spotlight in the world of documentation and competitive intelligence is not easy. However, it seems that the magic recipe which results from combining the strengths of the librarian world (capitalization, organization) and social networking (agility, usability, sharing) has finally drawn the attention and convinces, especially by highlighting mature projects that provide now over 2 years of experience and innovation to share with the world.

We therefore wanted to thank of course all of our clients because this award couldn’t have happened without the confidence they have kindly given to our solution as well as our team to assist them in their approach to Enterprise 2.0.

We also would like to thank a jury that wanted to emphasize this new wave that enables collaborative business intelligence and information specialists to adapat to their new reality. The jury was chaired by Martine Dejean, CEO at Information Management Bureau van Dijk, and composed of:

• Didier Benard, head of Scientific Information (SILS-Vitry), Sanofi Aventis R&D
• Roselyne Bloch, head of the documentation, Caisse d’Epargne Ile-de-France
• Danielle Dufour-Coppolani, who teaches information management and communication, board member of ADBS
• Bernard Guillot, head of business IES, Economic Development Department, Snecma – Safran Group
• Sophie Lafourcade, knowledge manager
• Silvere Mercier, responsible for Public Library information, board member of ADBS
• Bruno Louis Seguin, management consultant Information & Digital Identity, The Associated Activists (digital communications consultancy).

Other posts and press releases on this subject:

• Knowledge Plaza and Yoolink: Two challengers to monitor on Demain la Veille by Aref Jdey
• The winners of I-Expo / KM Forum 2010 on Archimag
• I-Expo and KM Forum: Intelligence and Knowledge to time to decide on Usine Nouvelle
• Awards I-Expo at IE website

So for when the Innovation Award at KM World?

Related posts:

1. Knowledge Plaza demo, captured by Veille.ma, during last Rencontres ICC in Paris
2. Knowledge Plaza vs. Diigo: more than social web annotation
3. Knowledge Plaza presentation at Betagroup

Last week, we proceeded to an update of Knowledge Plaza.

Here are some of the coolest improvements. Now you can:

Add a comment right from the KP bookmarklet

When you add a Web source, it often happens that you wish to express an opinion about it. So far, you had to go through the Plaza and open the newly added Tile to post a comment. Now, you don’t even have to go to the Plaza. You can comment the source directly from the bookmarklet, and bingo! The discussion can begin.

Read a document hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video, MSN Video or Slideshare from the Plaza

You can now watch a video or browse a presentation hosted on sites such as Youtube, Google Video, Vimeo or Slideshare directly from the Tile view. Other services will be added to the list. To be continued!

Modify the title of a wiki page

You asked for it. It’s become reality.

Add a new Tile from a Mosaic

It is now possible, right from a Mosaic, to add a new Tile to the Plaza that will be directly associated with that Mosaic.

Delete a wiki page, from it’s page view

And not only from the page editing window.

Access users settings from the administration panel

You’ll be able, as an administrator, to configure their preferred language, to subscribe them manually to activity digest, etc.

Access a user profile page or workspace homepage from the administration panel

You can now click on users names or workspaces to access their page.

Enjoy!

The Knowledge Plaza team

Related posts:

1. Knowledge Plaza release: enterprise 2.0 for everyone
2. Knowledge Plaza vs. Diigo: more than social web annotation
3. Knowledge Plaza presentation at Betagroup

Prior to our public launch of www.knowledgeplaza.net, we had been working with the enterprise edition of KP. We have one on-premise client using KPE (client in-house infrastructure), rest of cases are SaaS (software accessed remotely). But moving from a on-demand model to an automatic online sign-up open for everyone requires an intensive workload from the development point of view. I have briefly collected some insightful opinions from some of our developers so that they share with us their experiences on this massive swift of going fully ‘cloud’.

According to Raphael Slinckx, lead developer at Whatever, “the main challenge was moving from a manually operated instance creation and administration to a fully automated process that allows people to write their name in a box and have a running instance few seconds later”.

As SaaS service, the various elements of each instance are dispatched across several machines both for load
spreading and fault-resilience. They are registered in a central repository so that we can easily manage all those processes running on the various servers. We have also deployed a virtual machine creation automation to facilitate the process of adding servers.

The integration of a billing-payment gateway is also a crucial aspect here. And we don’t mean just the paying process. Now, users can get more or less service provision with a click of a mouse and that needs to be implemented in the architecture in a robust manner.

We also want to emphasize the importance of having a private beta period, not only to fine tune the service by fixing bugs but also to test the server load. We monitored the server load to see if it grew according to our model (and adapted the model as needed).

SaaS might be still in its infancy (we’ll leave that discussion for now), but net users aren’t. As technology evolves fast, we are tuning into advanced users with a -logically- lower tolerance to slowness or irresponsiveness. Server load testing processes are necessary to get ready for ‘massive consumption and usage’, to provide a good responsive service to that end user.

Likewise, as Patrick Rácz -developer with UI focus- points out, “adoption is more volatile in the cloud“, meaning end-users are also getting used to user-friendliness on cloud services. Thus, enterprise 2.0 apps in the cloud have some quite challenge here in terms of usability.

One of the main concerns of companies considering a move onto SaaS enterprise 2.0 is data migration. Currently, there are no standards (just like there is not yet cloud interoperability or ‘cross-cloud compatibility’). If you have your data on a system and you’d like to start using a different one, exporting those data won’t be an easy task, at all. Given that the underlying concepts of apps in the cloud may differ from each other, you can’t have a “standard” to represent them without information loss. Any migration would have to be done the way we handled migration from data into KP for other customers: 1) extract the old data in “some” readable format, 2) make a manual analysis on the best way to map the old data model to the new data model and 3) create a custom written conversion script.

So, due to that lack of standards, we offer assistance service with data migration. Upon request, as we’ve done with companies using Knowledge Plaza Enterprise, we can either import or export a database dump of all the data. So far, it’s a manual process trying to ensure and validate data integrity.

Finally, apart from a challenging move, they seem to agree that this process of moving onto an automated online sign-up has been time-consuming. Indeed. And now we have new milestones ahead.

No related posts.