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.
For example, a user in systems administration might start her user profile with the terms database, object-oriented and firewall. The keywords enable KnowledgeMail to flag incoming e-mails that contain those words. What's more, the software adds keywords and phrases to a profile based on the user's own e-mails as well as frequently viewed HTML documents. The software does this by picking out words or phrases that commonly occur in a user's e-mails and webpage hits. We can take a bird's eye view and see all the problems going on and identify patterns.