2007 KMWorld Promise and Reality Awards finalists

Selecting winners for these awards gets more difficult each year. When we handed out the first ones at the 2001 KMWorld conference, we received roughly 20 nominations for each category. The number of submissions has grown each year since then; we received more than 175 (both formal and informal) this year, and paring them down to these finalists was especially tough.

Sure, some of the entries were easy to eliminate—they came from people who hadn’t bothered to read and follow the criteria. But those aside, the rest were carefully examined by the judging panel, which included analysts, systems integrators and a select group of highly knowledgeable users. As usual (and unfortunately for me), they want to maintain their anonymity, fearing potential conflicts. So, that puts me in that most enviable of positions—the target for complaints.

We haven’t yet selected the winners of this year’s awards, but, to a person, we have agreed on the finalists. Obviously, what we’re able to publish in print just provides a small taste of the full value of, in the case of the KM Reality Award, the installed solutions, or, for KM Promise, the incredible potential of the offerings. So, please visit KMWorld.com and click on the KM Award button (or click here) to see the nominations themselves (note that in certain instances, we have been asked to withhold some information from publication).

—Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor in chief

KM PROMISE AWARD

Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. This award is given to the organization that is delivering on its promise to customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are embedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.

A2iA
Tools for document analysis and handwritten data extraction from paper documents.

ABBYY
FlexiCapture 8.0
Data extraction from structured forms, semi-structured forms, unstructured documents and any combination of several document types for input into databases, business systems and processes.

Alfresco
Open source content management systems that provide low total cost of ownership.

ASG Software Solutions
ASG-Rochade
A metadata management solution for large and medium-sized organizations that manages information about data and systems.

Astute Solutions
RealDialog
Natural language dialog-based contact center, relationship management and self-service solutions.

Cipher Systems
Knowledge.Works
Sophisticated tools to streamline the management of the competitive intelligence and knowledge management process.

Citrix Online
On-demand applications for remote desktop access.

Copyright Clearance Center 
Innovative licensing services and Web-based applications and tools.

Connectbeam
An information discovery tool combining concepts of social bookmarking and social networking.

Connotate
Machine intelligent agents that leverage the semantic Web, helping organizations develop new ways to conduct business.

Contextware
A platform to deliver the right content, tools and resources at the right time.

Coveo
CES 5.0
Secure, unified enterprise search across documents and multimedia files in file systems, e-mail servers, intranets, enterprise applications, databases and Web sites.