Foner sees great business potential for his research, and so do British Telecom IT executives. In fact, the company based some of KSE's technology on publicly available Yenta code. In other words, knowledge is not only power, it's profits. Compared with the knowledge stored in people, not much. And people's knowledge is often expressed in their e-mail exchanges with colleagues.
People also spend a good chunk of company time reading, sending and sorting through e-mail.
An underlying relational database contains user profile information, which determines topics of interest to particular users and how that information will be distributed to others. User profiles contain keywords and phrases that help people identify important e-mail. A feature called KnowledgeSweep uses keywords to help the software find people who can contribute knowledge to a company project or strategy, even if they're not directly involved. At a minimum, KnowledgeMail acts as an information filter. Users can create their own interest profiles by placing keywords into their central repository file.