KM Technology Assessment
“Knowledge and team
collaboration servers”
DSC8030/CIS8260
Dr. Samaddar
Summer 2004
Jon A. Preston
Agenda



Motivation/Need
Importance of collaboration servers
Leading Products





IBM/Lotus Discovery Server
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Comparison & Contrast
Deployment Considerations
Conclusions
Motivation/Need




Formalize knowledge markets
Discover patterns of knowledge
Identify covert experts
Capture knowledge formally



Best practices
Technical reports
Status of documents/projects
Collaborative Servers

Bring people together


Act as electronic librarians



KRD type information
Search for expertise, papers, etc.
Manage projects
Provide “total view” of company


Avoid blindness
Selective blindness
Industries
Business practices and processes that focus on
information access, knowledge sharing, business
application availability, and collaboration between
remote users are the best candidates to be implemented
within a portal framework across business domains that
include financial services, manufacturing, and
telecommunications companies.
- Cognizant Technology Solutions (2002)
Enterprise Portal Market
Leading Products

IBM/Lotus Discovery Server


1550 worldwide installations (2002)
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003
IBM/Lotus Discovery Server







Search
Expertise Location
Capture “relevant experiences”
Extracts, analyzes, & categorizes
“Reveals” relationships
Automatically generates and maintains K-maps
Generates & maintains user profiles – “uncovers”
knowledge
Searching
Knowledge Broker



Provides affinities
Provides contact
information
Denotes
availability



Off-line
On-line
Do not disturb
Performance Improvements in 2.0.1
Concurrent Documents
users
in system
250
300,000
Total
searches
per hour
Average
response
time (sec)
5,000
2.6
HTTP
CPU usage
CPU usage
(percent)
(percent)
47
29
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server




“Connects users, teams, and knowledge”
Enterprise solution
Single log-on (point of access)
Customization & personalization of portal






Organizational role
Team membership
Interest
Security
Locate documents, processes, and best practices
Integrates into existing applications
Searching





Files
Web servers
Microsoft Exchange Server folders
Lotus Notes
Automatic/push notification on additions and
changes
Document Management




Versioning
Approval workflow
Check-in and check-out
Status tracking/profiling
Customized Information
Searching
Document/Information Sharing
SharePoint Performance
Number of users
Recommended topology
< 1,000
Single server with Microsoft SQL
Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE)
< 10,000
Single server with SQL Server 2000
< 25,000 *
< 100,000
> 100,000
Small farm: Front-end Web server (1),
SQL (1+, optionally clustered)
Medium farm: Front-end Web server
or search (2),
index or job (1), SQL (1+, optionally
clustered)
Large farm: Front-end Web server
(2+), search (2+), index (1+), SQL
(1+, optionally clustered)
Single Server
Server type
RAM
Hard disk
CPU
Web, index, search, and
database
1 gigabyte (GB)
100 GB
Dual 2.8 GHz Pentium 4
A system built with the hardware described in the preceding table should have the following
performance characteristics:
Process 15 requests per second (Peak common action) (including 2 searches per second) with MSDE
Note
MSDE has a database size limit of 2 GB and a limit of 5 concurrent jobs.
Process 32 requests per second (including 4 searches per second) with SQL Server
Index 5 documents per second
Store up to 100,000 documents (using SQL Server)
Index up to 1 million documents (using SQL Server)
Host up to 10,000 team and personal sites
Host up to 5 portal sites (using shared services)
Large Server Farm
Server type
RAM
Hard disk
Number of computers
Web servers
2 GB
100 GB
2
Search servers
2 GB
200 GB
2
Database server
2 GB
200 GB
1
Index management
server
2 GB
100 GB
1
A system built with the hardware described in the preceding table should have the following
performance characteristics:
Process 100 requests per second (Peak common action) including 15 searches per second
Index 10 documents per second (up to 625-1105 of various types if scaled)
Store up to 1 million documents
Index up to 5 million documents
Host 50,000+ SharePoint sites and personal sites
Comparison/Contrast

Both offer




Discovery Server



Searching
Document sharing/managing
Contact information
Discovers knowledge, relationships
K-maps
SharePoint

More customized view (portal: calendar, news, etc.)
Deployment Considerations

Consider existing IT infrastructure



Integration to other systems possible, but
potentially problematic



Lotus Notes → Discovery Server
Microsoft Office/Exchange → SharePoint
Upgrades could break links
Leverage existing interfaces
K-map rules/relations may require “oversight”
Conclusions

Online collaborative tools vital



Personnel directory/searching



Sharing documents
Version control, profiling
Provides views of company
Access to experts
Tool selection dependant upon current technologies
in place

Document/user size may be a consideration
References










IBM Lotus Software - Discovery Server
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/office/sps2003/plan/cappis
ps.mspx
Knowledge Management Users Pick Smaller Vendors - Computerworld
Michael Fioritto's Weblog More content categorizers. [1].
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Resource Kit Chapter 5 Introducing Microsoft Full-Text Search Technologies
Network Computing Feature Business Applications The Big Three Branch
Out Page 3 July 23, 2001
PCWorld.com - Microsoft Readies Portal Server
SharePoint Portal Server Knowledge management for the masses
The economic down turn and events of September 11 have triggered ...