Tacit Wants To Make Collaboration Too Attractive To IgnoreTacit Wants To Make Collaboration Too Attractive To Ignore

Knowledge-management vendor Tacit Knowledge Systems is branching out. The maker of KnowledgeMail, a tool for mining E-mail and creating employee profiles used to identify potential collaborators, this week will ship the first version of ActiveNet, a collaboration-management application designed to glean project work from any collaboration tool and automatically link employees who should be working together.

Tacit says ActiveNet will hook into E-mail, team workspaces, portals, instant messaging, and other collaborative applications, proactively connecting people whose work is related. The idea is to give employees no choice but to collaborate. ActiveNet analyzes the flow of information through a company's collaboration infrastructure, detecting links between previously unconnected projects.

According to Tacit CEO David Gilmour, companies have invested heavily in communication and collaboration tools, but the inability of employees to find others who are doing related work has prevented collaboration. ActiveNet is designed to overcome this hurdle. The software is built in part on some of the automatic expertise discovery, people search, and contact-brokering capabilities of the vendor's KnowledgeMail and ESP products. But ActiveNet adds new capabilities, such as automatic person-to-person networking, automatic categorization, and content sharing.

ActiveNet is compatible with all IMAP-enabled E-mail servers and Java 2 Enterprise Edition app servers, and it can run on Microsoft or Oracle databases. No desktop deployment is necessary. Pricing depends on the size of the deployment, but a 500-seat license runs between $60,000 and $80,000.