[thelist] Blog based KM tool

Drew Shiel ashiel at sportsinteraction.com
Tue Jan 7 07:22:00 CST 2003


Hi folks;

I'm about to start a new project, which is for work, but done on my own
time. It's to be a weblog-based knowledge management tool.

The company I work for is expanding gradually - nor dreadfully fast, but
steadily. Due to the fact that all our "stuff" is written inhouse, it takes
quite some time to bring new developers up to speed. It took me about nine
months to get a grip on most things here, and there are still parts of the
system that I haven't touched.

To alleviate this problem, I propose to build a knowledge base.
Essentially, every developer - and probably the marketing and management
folks too - will have a weblog. Into that will go comments on what they're
doing, notes about how they're doing it, small things like the tips here on
thelist, ideas for improvements to existing tools and systems and so on.

That will then be searchable, so if I want to know about the part of the
system that deals with credit card processing, I can type "processing" and
get back what various people said about it at different times.

It'll be written in Cold Fusion and use a SQL Server database - more
because that's what we have in house and what I want to learn more about
than because of any inherent suitability.

So... I'd like some suggestions as to how to go about this. Should I build
some kind of index from the blogs, get users to tag them with keywords, do
a plain grep-for-that-text, or what? Are there any extra features I could
or should build in? Would comments be useful on this? Should I allow for
"personal" as well as work entries?

This'll probably be a long-term project, since it's coming out of my own time.

Cheers,
Drew.


Drew Shiel                               webmaster at swiftpay.com
                                                     +353-1-2365705
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