ERP5 KM leverages the acclaimed ERP5 framework to provide one of the most advanced and innovative Knowledge Management solutions. ERP5 KM is based on a proven architecture and model which can scale up to the largest organisations and meet the most demanding requirements.

Scalable Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management (KM) can be defined as "providing the right information to the right people at the right time". It is one of the most challenging management objectives in large organisations and communities. Succesful Knowledge Management often leads to vast cost savings or to new sources of income.

ERP5 KM has been designed for organisations or for communities where the number of people or the size of the information is high. In such demanding environments, technologies such as Enteprise Wiki or Enteprise Content Management do not always scale well enough, either for technical reasons or for management reasons.

Based on a benchmarking of existing KM solutions in large organisations, ERP5 KM has been designed to solve common problems found in most KM systems implemented in the last decade:

• Searching in ERP5 KM leverages the most advanced open source search engines. Technologies used in ERP5 KM for information indexing have already been implemented by communities of million users and hundred million pages. They support mutilingual environments, including Asian languages such as Japanese or Chinese.
• Contributing to ERP5 KM is obvious and ubiquitous. It requires no additional effort at the end of the day and is based standard Office formats (ex. DOC, ODT, XLS, ODS, PDF, HTML, etc.). Automatic classification and categorisation brings information instantly "to the right people" without requiring contributors to waste time entering complex metadata.
• Native Security in ERP5 KM is rule based and dynamic. It can match the most demanding policies including in organisations such as banking, governement or defense. Unlike traditional user and group based security, ERP5 KM security requires little or no system administration and can evolve over time without any data migration effort.
• Trust: ERP5 KM provides completele traceability and certification of information through versionning, staging, historisation and workflows. The status of information in ERP5 KM is clearly defined and tracked through configurable business processes.
• Unification of information in ERP5 KM is a core design principle. We take for granted the pre-existence of a diversity of technical solutions such as Wiki, CMS, file servers, mailing lists in large organisations and the requirement to provide a value-added unified access to all information without modifying existing solutions.
• Transversality is encouraged in ERP5 through multi-facetted publication of information and through a strong focus on communities and business processes.

Intention and Creation

ERP5 KM has been designed as a tool to support management rather than as a replacement to managenent. We believe that Knowledge Management can only succeed in an environment with well defined intentions in terms of business objectives and in termes of knowledge creation.

We therefore view ERP5 KM as a simple technical tool to support complex management processes. As a consequence, ERP5 KM focuses on providing a few straightforward features to many users rather than on showing off many fashionable features and gadgets a few technologically oriented users.

ERP5 KM is perfectly suited to implement collaborative KM approaches such as the Communities of Practice of Etienne Wenger or to implement a corporate move towards the Knowledge Creating Company as introduced by Nonaka and Takeuchi.

Successfuly Deployed

ERP5 KM has been deployed successfully by organisations in the following business fields:

• Information Technology
• International Diplomacy
• Transport

State of the Art Technologies

ERP5 KM is based on state of the art ERP5 framework. It provides the following innovative technologies:

• GRID computing: ERP5 KM can be implemented on Enterprise scale clusters ranging from a couple of nodes to thousand nodes. It can support thousands of contributing users and communities of million users.
• Hybrid Indexing: ERP5 KM provides a hybrid indexing engine which integrates Full Text with NGrams and Asian Support, relations, categories and security.
• Placeless Publication: ERP5 KM handles publication in a very innovative way to solve common problems of multi-facetted publication in a light and straightforward way.
• External Sources provide access and integration of pre-existing knowledge sources through standard protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, CIFS, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc.
• Conversion Server: ERP5 KM integrates a scalable and distributed conversion server which can convert and render the most complex business documents in more than 100 file formats, including DOC, ODT, XLS, ODS, PDF, etc.
• Workflows can be configured to model all knoweldge processes in ERP5 KM, including publication, translation, issue tracking, meeting organisation, etc.
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): ERP5 KM can be integrated within corporated information systems (ex. SAP, Oracle, J2EE, etc.) through standard compliant protocols such as XML-RPC or SOAP.