The aim of knowledge management environments is to make it easier for business users to share and collate knowledge within and across their organisations, a process that messaging-based systems such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange have both helped and hindered. Many users now use their email as a basic form of indexing. The simplicity of recalling information by date and by name has revolutionised personal filing and storage. However, currently there are few direct links between email and other textual information apart from when documents are attached to messages. The aim of knowledge management vendors is to develop links between all forms of communication in order to create pools of shared information.
Analysts believe that knowledge management has great potential.
The KM need comes from the sheer volume of information created by email and internal databases, and the complexity of organising this data and searching it efficiently. The situation is made more complicated for companies by the fact that many vendors are appearing with a wide range of competing solutions to tackle the problem. Thanks to their large number of users, few doubt that Microsoft and Lotus will lead the market, even though neither has shipped a fully-fledged knowledge management solution. Lotus's Raven project competes against Microsoft's Tahoe initiative, an Exchange-centred plan to make it easier to reorganise and tag content. Both Lotus and Microsoft have a huge installed base of users of their email and collaborative tools.