KnowledgeTree added several new features to its content management product this week designed to help employees find documents locked away deep inside the company content repository.

The problem, as KnowledgeTree sees it, is that documents get uploaded into a content management black hole never to be found again. The whole point of content management always has been to avoid that problem. You want to make documents easily accessible by taking them from a shared drive kind of environment and putting them into a system that tracks and provides some order for them.

Apparently in KnowledgeTree's view, something went terribly wrong with this vision because as we gather more and more documents, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the documents we need and employees are back to reinventing the wheel or using outdated documents.

KnowledgeTree CEO Daniel Chalef says it's time to give users the tools they need to access these documents and put them to use in their work. "Documents are business assets--immense resources have been invested in finance, legal, and sales material," Chalef said. "That value has to be harnessed."

Search can help of course, but KnowledgeTree wants to go one step further and bring analytics to bear on the problem. They hope that by identifying factors such how many times a document has been downloaded and how many views, comments and likes it has, it can give the user enough insight into the document to make an intelligent decision about whether to use it or not.

KnowledgeTree is introducing three new features to help:

• Smart Analytics to help users identify the best documents.
• Smart Trends to help users identify how to improve and manage documents (using wisdom of the crowds).
• Smart Feeds to keep users up-to-date on changes to documents they care about.

None of these are huge ground-breakers, but if they work as described, in combination, they could help users track and find documents that are important to them for doing their jobs, and that is the goal of content management tools.

For more information:
- see the KnowledgeTree press release

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