Kmworld News & Articles

It is getting close to the end of the year and as well as all the happy, good will stuff, it’s also the time for awards and jockeying for best position in the market to kick-off 2010. Yesterday we gave you Gartner’s ECM Magic Quadrant, today it’s the finalists for the KM World (news, site) 2009 Promise and Reality Awards.

The winner is chosen from a list of Knowledge Management companies that nominate themselves (or are nominated) with the award given to the company that provides innovative solutions for best knowledge management practices into their business processes.

The winning company will be that company that shows they have taken the extra step to ensure that not only have they delivered their client companies with a given technology or knowledge process, but that they have also followed that up to ensure that it is properly embedded in the company’s work process.

KMWorld (news, site) has dropped its list of Trend Setting companies for 2009 and there are more than a few familar faces making the list.

Each year KMWorld publishes the top 100 knowledge management companies "with attitude." Relying on feedback from colleagues, analysts, system integrators and the vendors themselves, the annual list spotlights organizations that demonstrate a commitment to customer-driven innovation and exceptional market agility.

Below, a shortlist of industry standouts -- and why they made it this year.

After a stellar year full of many successful solutions, Recommind started off 2009 right by targeting users of next-generation search with their release of MindServer Search 6.0.

We predicted the providers of Information Risk Management (IRM) software to be poised for another round of success. Here to support that prediction is KMWorld Magazine’s “Top 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management” list, which Recommind has landed placement on for the sixth year in a row.

KMWorld magazine has selected Nstein Technologies’ Web Content Management (WCM) as a “KMWorld Trend-Setting Product of 2008”. Nstein’s WCM product joins another Nstein creation, Text Mining Engine (TME), in earning the honor, with TME being named a trend-setting product for the past few years.

WCM is a content management system that has many familiar and useful features including content editing workflows, content tagging, and metadata management. WCM is engineered by Nstein to make it possible for content creators and editors to manage content without necessarily having to involve technical staff. WCM is build on web standards and utilizes declarative XML to allow its users to customize the site’s content layout and look/feel.

WCM 4, Nstein’s latest version, features a semantic assistant to help tie content together to create a sticky customer experience. Also, the backoffice of the product has been re-designed to make publishing content easy and quick. The editorial dashboard is customizable, allowing site administrators to tailor the content management user interface to their staff’s needs.

KMWorld selected the list 2008 trend-setting products by evaluating product’s ability to deliver astounding customer value.

SpringCM, an enterprise document management vendor, has announced that KMWorld Magazine has placed its Software-as-a-Service platform in the Trend-Setting Product List of 2008.

Another one bites the dust — er — makes the list. KMWorld’s List of Trend Setters for 2008 also includes Ektron and their CMS400.Net content management solution.

Now you all know who Ektron is, they are the little guy that beat out the likes of Vignette, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, EMC and others for top spot in Gartner’s MarketScope for Web Content Management 2008. The only one they didn’t “beat” was Interwoven.

According to Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor-in-chief, “Ektron has proven that they are committed to providing both quality and excellence in their solutions that benefit the customer experience.”

Other than winning all these awards, Ektron’s been pretty busy this year. They opened offices in Canada, brought social networking into the office as part of their solution offering, integrated CMS400.net with Silverlight, launched a new partner portal and more. Whew…busy little beavers aren’t they.

Now on version 7.5 of the web content management solution CMS400.Net, we expect to see even more from these guys over the next little while.

While we don’t argue with these vendors making the list — in fact, in most cases it’s easy to see why they do — it would be nice if KMWorld was a little more specific on what “trend setting” really means and how it applies to each vendor. Maybe we’ll see more detail in the Septemeber issue of the magazine when the list is released in full.

Yes, that’s right, KMWorld has released it’s list of Trend-Setting Products for 2008 and we have yet another vendor announcing they made the list. This time it’s iDatix and it’s enterprise content management solution iSynergy.

The 12th annual KMWorld and Intranets Conference and Exhibition is scheduled for September 23 – 25, 2008, in San Jose, California. This year’s theme, Driving Enterprise Innovation and Achievement: User-Focused Tools and Practices, emphasizes the myriad of new ways to communicate, collaborate and exchange knowledge within the enterprise.

The event will also cover such hot topics as ECM, intranet and portal strategies, enterprise 2.0, knowledge sharing, enterprise search and much more.

JustSystems, a Japanese software vendor specializing in XML and information management technologies, announced that XMetaL, the company’s XML-based software for structured authoring and content collaboration, has been selected as a 2008 KMWorld Trend-Setting Product.

KMWorld has published it’s annual list of ‘Companies That Matter’ in Knowledge Management. Editor Hugh McKellar and an esteemed board of industry-savvy judges have sifted through the marketing gloop, sorted the wheat from the chaff, held up the KM Champions and banished the chancers and n’er do wells to eternal KM oblivion.

Until next year, at least.

I am always skeptical of any “Year’s Best” award given out well before the year has finished. I liken it to movies that premier in January and call themselves the “must-see movie of the year.” It always seems a little too premature.

In this case, I’ll make an exception. Nstein’s Ntelligent Content Management Suite, which has the unique ability to relate to both publisher and consumer, has deservingly been crowned one of the “Trend-Setting Products of 2007” as named by KMWorld magazine.