Our Experience in Building KM Tools
We've built many web based applications for different types of organizations, ranging from simple web sites for small businesses to tools for knowledge management (KM) for large enterprises and NGOs. We've gone through the spectrum of solutions -- building our own content engines and trying out other solutions.
As our company evolved and gained experience, we found no technology more powerful and more suitable to knowledge sharing and collaboration than the Drupal engine.
Why Drupal?
Drupal is suitable for a lot of other purposes but the full context here is "Why use Drupal for KM?". Knowledge management only happens when people communicate and collaborate. Here are some bullet points to answer the question:
- Experts have pointed out that no other technology is more suitable to enrich knowledge than the web. One quick, important argument for this is that the web is a good storage of knowledge, and search engines make it easier to find that knowledge.
- The web works a lot like knowledge. To build the web, you need an army of people who voluntarily share what they know. These pieces of information are in turn, linked to other information in other web pages, created by other people who also have some sort of knowledge.
- As pointed out earlier, all these webs of knowledge will mean nothing if they are not easily searchable.
- This is where search engines and tagging enter the picture. We all know what search engines do since we use them to help us find information on the web. The other half of the picture is tagging -- tagging is the human side of the quest for knowledge. Search engines are automated and do not (yet) have the ability to qualitatively judge the content of a piece of information. So until search engines can think like humans, tagging will remain in the realm of humans.
- In all of the content management systems we have tried, none have the tagging capabilities of Drupal. For instance both Sharepoint and Lotus Quickplace cannot do multitagging whereas Drupal can do this out of the box. Note that Sharepoint and Quickplace are expensive pieces of software (Sharepoint is free but will only run on Windows servers, which cost a lot to buy and maintain).
- Drupal is built in a modular framework, which makes it very flexible. If you need new functionalities, you can simply develop pluggable modules.
