McCann is also keen on his company's newly launched Collector 1.0, which lets users collect Gizmoz that are represented on the desktop and alert users to changes in data. McCann says 7 percent of the recipients have used it 1.5 times per week on average. The division distributes a high volume of messages, tracks them and delivers reporting services. Citing a Forrester Research report, the company says there'll be 250 billion outsourced e-mail messages this year, up from 3 billion in 1998. Vendors aren't embellishing e-mail with a glittery array of features simply to make it a more powerful marketing tool.
Some companies offer products that turn e-mail into both a gatherer and a purveyor of knowledge.
While they take different approaches, each goes a long way toward adding punch to traditional e-mail and boosting an enterprise's knowledge management capabilities. One of the failings of big-ticket knowledge management strategies has been ensuring that employees participate by imparting knowledge as well as seeking it. But e-mail can alleviate the problem by reaching out to workers, snagging relevant bits of data, aggregating and categorizing it, and then offering it to knowledge seekers. Software from Tacit Knowledge Systems Inc. analyzes corporate e-mail to determine what each employee knows by the words used most frequently in his messages and then builds that information into a user profile. MimEcom selected KnowledgeMail in part because it was the only product the company found that did this for e-mail, says Brian Davies, director of global services management.