Empowering your knowledge workers with Enterprise 2.0

It's tempting to think of your business's knowledge as documentation, white papers and reports. But too much formality leads to a lack of business innovation and the sharing of information in real-time, at-the-point- of-need.

Knowledge is a social process and no one can take responsibility for all collective knowledge within your business. Since a lot of your business's knowledge is tacit and self-organising the most important way to advance it is to remove the barriers to self-organisation.

Old-school content management systems required users to tag their documents with metadata using prescribed taxonomies. Usually the taxonomy was forgotten in time or users didn't have the discipline to keep tagging their documents once the initial KM initiative had run its course.

Firestring's unique knowledge technologies do it differently. We don't rely on manual user tagging, and instead make use of leading-edge semantic matching to automatically index the contents of your documents - not just by keyword, but also by the conversational themes contained within.

This brings a new dimension to the storage and retrieval of information - it's user-friendly and persists over time and across projects.

It doesn't matter if your users each have different keywords in mind for the same thing - Firestring's Semantic Knowledge Management Engine brings consistency to the metadata process, creating a unique company-wide taxonomy as new information is added to the system. At the same time, Firestring's Social Knowledge Widgets interface with Microsoft® SharePoint®, bringing real collaboration and enterprise social networking value to your shared digital workspace.

And once a user finds information or has information 'pushed' to them, they can rank it and rate it, influencing the system's profiling of that user and the kind of information that will automatically be shown to them and to their community of contacts on the Network.

We've also adopted the powerful matching and referral approaches found at Amazon.com - linking information and other people to users based on their profile and semantic matches. If you're reading a blog, our Social Widgets will let you know which other blogs you might be interested in - as well as other users that share interests with you.

Find people and documents, intelligently

The Semantic Knowledge Management Engine radically enhances information sharing across the organisation, with built-in intelligence it's able to tell what's been stored in Microsoft® SharePoint® and Xerox Docushare and display it to your employees automatically based on their profiles.

If you're not already using a portal or content management system, our software also runs as a standalone platform in your organisation.

Knowledge comes looking for you

Search is also accelerated - not limited to keywords - we offer semantic search so you can find information with a meaning similar to your original search term.

With the Firestring Semantic Plug-In for Microsoft® SharePoint® - you can provide your users with an enterprise grade Facebook-like interface commonly adopted by knowledge workers today.

Privacy Permissions and Private Groups

Firestring's Enterprise Social Network has project-based groups that offer public and invite-only facilities for the exchange of information according to real team structures. This is particularly useful when these teams have permissions different to AD (Active Directory), where content sharing and permissions need to be set up dynamically in alignment with specific, and sometimes changing, project requirements.

The Firestring Semantic Knowledge Management Engine and Semantic Microsoft® SharePoint® Plug-In provides advanced search capabilities - employees can proactively look for the information while our widgets also continuously deploy matching algorithms notifying you when new people or content is added to the system with tags that match your interests.

Firestring's Enterprise Social Network

• Supports team sharing and innovation
• Drives project communication and centralized collaboration
• Promotes silo-busting across divisions and territories
• Blogs and Collaborative Wikis
• Turns your company into a Learning Organization
• Sustains your business conversations before and after workshops and conferences
• Stores IP and business-critical conversations
• Delivers a secure, persistent and centralized knowledge base for your business

Software Features

• Automated Content Matching
• Semantic search through keywords and context
• Media Libraries
• Blogs and Collaborative Wikis
• Photo sharing
• Quick status updates
• Reporting Analytics
• Web Rendition for viewing documents, spreadsheets and project plans online (including PDF format)
• Event Management
• Tag Clouds for Network 'mood' analysis
• Inbox for quick messaging to people or to all of the members of a Group
• Email notifications
• Integration into your existing file sharing directories, within Microsoft® SharePoint®, Xerox Docushare and other applications

Software Modules

• Firestring Enterprise Social Network
• Serendipity Semantic Knowledge Matching Engine
• Firestring Microsoft® SharePoint® Plug-ins
• Firestring Xerox Docushare Plug-ins

Software Hosting Model

• SaaS provided by Firestring on servers hosted in South Africa or internationally as per requirements
• Behind your firewall installation - either within your on-site server architecture or on other nominated hosted servers locally or internationally