Last Sunday at Lotusphere 2010, Collaboration Matters launched the Knowledge Network, our new Social Collaboration and Knowledge Management suite for Lotus Domino.
The Knowledge Network, or K-Net for short, is a rounded suite of social tools allowing organisations to enable their users to more easily share information, find skills and resources, collaborate with others and to build an organisations network of knowledge.
During the next couple of weeks, we’ll be introducing each of the most significant features of the solution in a series of blog posts.  See the bottom of this entry for links to previous posts and the announcement itself.
Introducing Spaces
Spaces are areas where dynamic communities of users can find each other, share content, discuss topics, generate new ideas and share resources. Â Typically, these users are brought together around a common interest, topic, practice, project or activity. Â They can be used for both business and social purposes and are both powerful and very easy to use.
Here’s an example:
As you can see, I’ve created a Space to be used by a community being built around this Lotusphere event.
In the Space I can see links to the Space’s Index (table of contents or home page), its Blog, Coversations (a forum or discussion threads), Members (a list of all the members of the Space including permissions) and About (details of how and why this Space was created):
Within the Index page, we have a table of contents and a feed to the latest updates from the Space:
This Space includes a number of different kinds of content, including Folders (Spaces can have a full directory structure of content), Ideas (suggestions for the community to discuss) and Documents (rich text items), Links (to other sites/URLs). Other forms of content supported include Videos (taking an embed code from a video site such as YouTube) and Files (multiple files can be attached to each entry).  This means that the Space can contain a mixture of social content (bookmarks, discussions, video) and also more formal content (company documentation etc) – this marks Spaces as being more flexible than some other social community solutions.
The Space Blog allows the expected blogging features – controls of who can post, rich text posts, links to other resources, comments from Space members – plus some you may not expect, such as the automatic generation of tags from a post’s content, a full rating system for posts and comments (graded from 1-5), recommendations, ability to subscribe to comments on an individual post by RSS, adding to a favourites list within K-Net and the reporting of inappropriate content:
The Conversations page offers a dynamic forum for discussion, with the default view offering a list of discussion entries:
Each individual conversation is a fully threaded discussion, with rich text entries and comments, and the ability to tag each element of the conversation.
Lastly, the member list shows all members of the Space, along with their access rights:
That’s a very quick run-through of Spaces – a very dynamic and intuitive area for communities to gather and to share ideas and content.
The Spaces feature can be customised and extended according to your organisation’s need.
This is the third in our series of K-Net introductions, previous entries include:
Introducing the Knowledge Network
Knowledge Network – introducing the user profile
The formal announcement is also available:
Announcement: Collaboration Matters Bring Comprehensive Enterprise 2.0 Social Collaboration Suite to Lotus Domino
For more information, please contact Stuart McIntyre by email, phone (+44 121 288 0080), or Twitter.
