Press Releases

Hyperwave eKnowledge Portal Links Users with the Information They Need

First Web-Based Portal That Manages Its Own Hyperlinks

October 4, 1999

Hyperwave Information Management, Inc., announced today the Hyperwave eKnowledge Portal (HIP), a new Web-based portal that delivers on the corporate portal promise of building and utilizing a company's intellectual capital.

HIP makes structured and unstructured corporate information searchable via a browser-accessible networked environment. Its unique link management technology assures that workers find the documents they're looking for every time and reduces Webmaster administration.

"In today's market, the most valuable commodity is clearly time," said Tom Koulopoulos, president of The Delphi Group. "The Hyperwave eKnowledge Portal creates time for its users by providing the tools necessary to not only aggregate information from myriad disparate sources, but more importantly, by managing the connections between information sources. This means that users are not thrashing about in myriad applications and repositories and rummaging through broken hyperlinks. Time creation is the real value of HIP."

HIP also incorporates self-publishing and "find-the-expert" technology. These collaborative functions encourage knowledge sharing among knowledge workers, separating HIP from other portal solutions that are little more than a new way to access the same old information.

"The purpose of a portal is to share useful knowledge," said Gary McGrath, general manager of Hyperwave. "But if we survey the portal market today, we find that most portals simply provide interesting interfaces to unreliable content. Hyperwave eKnowledge Portal is a portal with integrity - one that encourages knowledge workers to share ideas, while at the same time reducing the administrative burdens of content and link management."

HIP is the only Web portal to automatically manage the links between documents. Dynamic, bi-directional link management eliminates broken links and hides the links to documents users are not authorized to see. This ends user frustration with dead-end navigation while minimizing administrative requirements.

Administration is further reduced since HIP permits authorized users to publish or modify information without Webmaster intervention or document reformatting. When users submit content in its native format (more than 250 file formats are supported), full-text indexing, metadata extraction and hyperlink extraction occur automatically to make documents search-ready. Documents can also be automatically filed based on explicit or implicit rules.

HIP offers all the features that have made corporate portals one of the most promising new Web product categories, including aggregation of unstructured and structured content, as well as content from news sources, groupware and the Internet. It fortifies these features with collaborative functions such as document annotation and routing. Integrated discussion forums and integration with leading collaborative clients promote knowledge-sharing within the organization. Push capabilities deliver focused content to users, or users can automate their own agents to scan for and deliver new information on topics of interest.

HIP can be customized to increase usability and incorporate company graphics and banners. Multiple interfaces can be created to serve the needs of different user communities. For example, an interface can be designed around a user group's access privileges or the tasks it most commonly performs.

Built on a Foundation of Information Management

HIP is built on the award-winning Hyperwave Information Server, which combines sophisticated document and knowledge management with standards-based Web technology.

"With Hyperwave, we have an extremely powerful and cost-effective solution for creating, archiving and sharing reports, while meeting our critical needs for document security and ease of use," said David Forrest, a research associate with Allegheny Ludlum, which has used the Hyperwave Information Server since 1997. "Hyperwave's information management capabilities are far and away superior to conventional web servers or document management systems. For example, we can publish a document or collection of materials just once, and our people can access it in multiple ways using general or specific searches. At the same time, Hyperwave provides a very clean system of managing access privileges. And all of this is handled automatically, so that we did not have to add a Webmaster - anybody familiar with a PC can use the system."

The Hyperwave Information Server is scalable via a distributed, multi-server architecture that lets information be stored where created and increases overall performance. By comparison, most competing solutions rely on a centralized document repository that can lead to traffic bottlenecks and a single point-of-failure, or use data replication that requires continual updating. Hyperwave Information Server is the choice of such well-known enterprises as Siemens, Bank of Switzerland, Bosch, BMW and Daimler-Chrysler.