CEO Profiles: Bisher Abaza, CEO,ByteQuest

Building a seamless knowledge management solution

Expertise hinges upon the knowledge workers' ability to access information assets regardless of format or location--hardcopy (paper/microform), electronic (image/text/Web/reports) and virtual (database records). Today, documents are often unmanaged in hard disks and filing cabinets, or managed in a fragmented way (fax servers, imaging systems, COLD).

Documents are also a component of knowledge, and must be managed within the organization's knowledge map (taxonomy). Knowledge managers must therefore be able to capture knowledge items from multiple sources and provide access to them irrespective of format/location. They must also promote the execution of actions on knowledge, using E-mail, workflow and other means. They must be capable of "knowledge-enabling" business applications.

SQL-based relational databases are the foundation of such capabilities. Full-text provides an important complement to search through the profiles/contents of textual documents.

The ByteQuery knowledge manager is SQL-based and incorporates full-text search capabilities. Its Knowledge Map provides a unified classification and security for all knowledge items (hardcopy/electronic/virtual), and features a logical hierarchy that includes folders, sub-folders and cabinets. The folders are Compound Folders that reference documents that are themselves located within multiple repositories, in any format.

Users can capture objects from Applications, Explorer, Exchange, Object Managers and Web browsers, and can locate them within the classification. They can set "capture rules" defining how objects are captured and classified (autoclassification). Through its inheritance scheme, tacit knowledge can be classified in the knowledge map, thus becoming explicit.

ByteQuery users can access objects, without knowing their location and format, using various methods: Knowledge Map navigation; profile/content search; folder content discovery; folder and folder content delivery by business applications; and workflows. When implemented with ByteQuest (Object Manager), it provides advanced management capabilities for a variety of object formats. ByteQuery can reference in its knowledge map objects that are not in its custody. With its API it can knowledge-enable business applications, workflows and groupware.