Lotusphere 2000: Raven finally takes flight for Lotus

Lotus has launched its long-awaited knowledge management portal on the start of Lotusphere - its annual European user conference in Berlin.

The K-Station business intelligence software will ship in November. It was code-named Raven during its development process and originally slated for release in mid-summer 2000. Al Zollar, CEO of Lotus, unveiled the product in his keynote address. He said: "K-Station is how we discover and classify information. It's now not enough to have information at your fingertips. You need to be able to locate it, and determine its relevance, and turn it into knowledge." K-Station integrates with the Lotus Domino environment, combining technologies such as E-Learning and Sametime instant messaging. Discovery Server, the advanced searching facilities that were present in Raven, will not ship with K-Station until early 2001. Martha Bennett, VP at Giga Group, said the software moves Lotus in the right direction. But she added Lotus has to be aware that firms are still struggling with the concept of knowledge management. She told silicon.com: "People continue to wrestle with the cultural aspects of knowledge management, which are about the fundamental ways businesses operate. You have to ask if they're putting together anything to educate users around this, as they can't afford a repetition of what happened with Notes, where many implementations just ended up using it as an email client."