November 1, 1999 Web posted at: 9:42 a.m. EST (1442 GMT) by Mary Lisbeth D'Amico

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(IDG) -- Knowledge management is something many companies are sure they need, if only they knew what it was.

Lotus is hoping to clear up the confusion - and open up a new market for itself - with its newly announced Raven. Lotus this week promised to deliver the knowledge management product to market by mid-2000. Raven was announced last week at Lotusphere in Germany.

The idea of knowledge management products is to help employees put into context the floods of information with which they are deluged. Raven will group together different data-mining techniques developed in the research labs of parent IBM and at Lotus' Knowledge Management Institute, where it has looked at how its customers collaborate, Lotus executives said.

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A handful of users at Lotusphere were enthused about Raven, but some weren't quite sure what it was all about.

"Superb" was how one Lotus Notes user described the knowledge management scenario laid out by Lotus CEO and President Jeff Papows. "It's taking Notes a step further," said Frank Atkins, a U.K.-based business system manager for Center Parcs, which operates family recreation parks in Europe.

Atkins wondered whether companies would have the skills necessary to properly implement the knowledge management solution, however. He also felt that the term "knowledge management" was a daunting one. "You need to call it something else. You frighten the hell of out everyone when you talk about knowledge management," Atkins said.

"I think it is a very interesting concept," said Waltraud Höfer, product-planning expert at RWG GmbH based in Stuttgart, Germany. RWG is a systems integrator that helps German savings banks implement IT systems. RWG is a user of Lotus' collaborative software, Notes/Domino, according to Höfer.

A knowledge management product would be a perfect add-on to an extranet that RWG has recently installed on behalf of a group of savings banks in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Höfer said. The extranet offers online communities to brokers where they can enter into discussion forums or link to Web sites on topics that interest them.

"Now we are thinking further," Höfer said on how to get more value out of the extranet. Höfer said the expertise location feature, designed to let users locate the experts in their own organization who can help them would be of particular interest.

As explained by Lotus executives, expertise location technology involves building and maintaining lists of employees based on information gathered about them, such as projects they have worked on or documents they have forwarded. To deal with the privacy issues that creates, the person being profiled has final control over how they are characterized in these lists.

Rinat Ehrlich, an IT manager with Herzlia, Israel-based VocalTec Communications Ltd., a voice over IP company, presented a more skeptical viewpoint about Raven. "I'll believe it when it's ready," she said. Her company is more concerned right now about successfully switching from Version 4.6 to Version 5.0 of Notes/Domino.

Lotus is not alone in the knowledge management field. Microsoft also announced its own knowledge management strategy this year, based on a set of document library and search services, codenamed Tahoe, and a workflow tool called Grizzly.

Lotus claims it has a significant lead over Microsoft. Microsoft's products do not address putting people in context or creating places designed for collaboration, according to Andrew Mahon, senior manager for knowledge management marketing at Lotus' headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

"While Raven will be able to analyze people, places and things, Microsoft's product can only look at "no people, no places and half a thing," he claimed.

One Gartner Group analyst agreed, calling Microsoft "eons" behind Lotus in this area.

"In terms of delivering an integrated knowledge management suite, Lotus is way ahead of the game," said Tom Austin, a Nashua, N.H. analyst for electronic workplace technologies with Gartner Group. Certain companies deliver pieces of what Lotus has unveiled, and some of those components are better than what Lotus has to offer, Austin said.