HAVE YOU EVER STOPPED TO CONSIDER THE NUMBER of emails you receive daily from your manager or colleagues that require a status update on one of the projects that you are currently working on or have recently been assigned. The volume is magnified by the fact that each email contains a mix of new information that you need to see and a large portion of old information and dialogue that you have already addressed. Unfortunately you have to read through your entire daily correspondence to find those new information bullets and action items, unless you are able to take advantage of a very viable and practical alternative to this process.

In a “knowledge managed” corporation, you would continue to receive your emails but you would also be provided with a supplement that has extracted only relevant information for you. The supplement would give you the new contextual information in the emails with relevant links and data based intranet as well as Internet source information. All you would have to do now is validate the information and provide appropriate feedback and decision support. This may sound like a visit to Futureworld, but according to Pallavi Shah, worldwide market segment manager of Knowledge Management and Collaboration at Sun Microsystems, Sun and its partners are making this a reality for businesses today.

“What was once perceived as relevant only in the realms of rich media is now in high need within the enterprise,” states Shah, an evangelist for knowledge management, who is passionately pushing businesses to recognize and implement strategies to manage their enterprise-wide knowledge. "Only 20 percent of an organization's information-base is indexed- and managed by traditional IT infrastructure. That means 80 percent of the knowledge is lying fallow," exclaims Shah. “There are assets residing throughout the enterprise that could be mined and utilized far more productively and we are helping companies recognize these tremendous assets and capitalize on the opportunities the employment of knowledge management processes presents.”

Knowledge Management is a combination of people, processes and technology. The challenge is to capture and distribute the knowledge held among individuals within a corporation to fellow workers, team and corporate management and externally with partners and customers, according to set business rules. Shah is working at Sun to deliver a class of solutions comprised of document management, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), collaboration and content management applications. From Web pages to spreadsheets, video and audio, discussion threads, employee directories, and multimedia presentations organizations are experiencing an explosion of information. Furthermore, the variety of delivery channels and the expectations from users to receive customized, actionable information made available through Internet technologies only adds to the complexity of managing, finding and publishing content to customers, business partners, and employees.

Organizations today are in a constant race to deliver enhanced and expanded customer service programs. According to the Ovum Research Group the total market for content management software and services will be worth over $13 billion by 2004 and this is the target Shah and her Sun team are focused on addressing.

To further enhance its solution offerings, Sun Microsystems Inc., recently acquired Pixo Inc., a privately held San Jose, CA firm, specializing in the design of technology to manage the secure distribution of digital content for mobile customers.

“We view DRM as the platform that enables new business models,” says Shah. “There are five separate components to DRM: Contract management—an extension of order management, Packaging—which deals with encryption and decryption technology, Usage tracking—that tracks content usage based on the content rights, Authorization, Authentication and Access control—components that maps the license distribution, accesses, and ratification of the users, and finally, Secure super distribution. These are all separate applications driven by the requirements of different businesses.”

As an example, a public broadcasting company may be interested in gaining a better understanding of their viewers through simple usage tracking-such as finding out what kind of content is desired. Alternatively, a major movie studio may want a more comprehensive understanding of its viewers needs that would ensure both that the type of product offered matches current market demand and that a product's use did not exceed its contracted access once purchased.

“Although these business models are different, and may require a different range of application and service choices, the underlying platform, (that is to say the middleware that ties these services together) requires the same functional support. That support is the piece of the puzzle that Sun provides,” says Shah.

Enterprises today require a flexible, scalable design to ensure the successful implementation of content services. By selecting an open standards based platform such as Sun's, IT managers are assuring their ability to readily add or remove application and service components as business requirements change. Additionally, with Sun's platform approach, the time required to fully integrate various content services with existing IT infrastructure and business processes (such as CRM) is dramatically reduced.

DRM is rapidly becoming an integral part of successful companies' corporate and Internet infrastructure, and Sun has recognized that the end game is to have fast, efficient access to extensible services providing a huge competitive advantage and quick return on investment (ROI) for business today. “For example, in case of DRM, Sun Microsystems provides the Java platform technology and the expertise companies (ISVs and partners) provide the DRM infrastructure,” says Shah.

“With the rapid evolution in web technology and dynamic generation of content, market verticals such as government, media, and the entertainment industries are already standardizing the implementation of this technology,” says Shah. “Sun has implemented the content distribution infrastructure with many partners such as RealNetworks and recently announced a DAM reference architecture that was developed for WGBH-a PBS affiliate station from Boston.” Sun professional services worked closely with WGBH and several companies, including Sony, Artesia, Thomson GrassValley, Harris, Telestream and Apple to solve WGBH's DAM problem, Eventually the program will tie into partners and other PBS affiliates like WNET in New York.

There is an abundance of quality DAM and DRM offerings in the market today, but the challenge lies in being able to integrate the different components to form a customized and seamless solution. “At Sun we believe the best way to insure implementation success is to select the correct underlying platform technology to build upon. It is really that simple,” Shah underlines. And she isn’t stopping there. “Your enterprise is next,” laughs Shah.