Posts Tagged ‘Infovark’
Infovark Templates: Local Files
The file is the basic unit of computer information. From a collaboration perspective, there are plenty of file-centric tools designed for sharing files — network drives, SharePoint, box.net — even the Internet itself isn’t much more than a collection of files, shared through various protocols.
For a knowledge worker, the files they work with daily usually map directly to a particular work task — for example, minutes of a meeting, or a document detailing a deliverable. They can also contain knowledge sourced from other people or places, like news reports or policy documents.
Regardless of what’s in them, Files are also the primary unit of plagiarism. I don’t mean plagiarism in a bad way; if these files can be said to “belong” to anyone, they belong to the Enterprise as a whole. It’s common for a valuable file within the organization to be re-purposed multiple times. Making key documents available to other people in your organization can be a huge productivity enabler.
By default, these files nearly always end up on your local machine. People mail them to you, they leave them lying around on network drives for you to copy. You download them from the web and read them locally. Despite all our efforts to try to centralize file storage, my computer is full of all kinds of files collected through my work. And as much as I can appreciate the benefits of cloud-based storage, I don’t think that this is going to change anytime soon.
And although files are traditionally thought of as unstructured data, it turns out there’s a lot of indexable and valuable information that can be collected from them. It’s just takes a bit more work for us software developers than accessing data that’s already been put into a database or some other structured format.
Infovark and Files
Infovark will process any file you give it, but it has best results with files that contain meaningful text. By default, Infovark scans all Microsoft Office files, PDFs, and plain text files, but you can include other file formats if you like. Infovark will do the best job it can.
To have your Infovark process a file, you need to tell it where to look. You can do this from the Infovark Manager, on the Files tab:
You just need to specify the folder that the document is in – that’s it. From here, your Infovark will keep an eye on the directory, and when you save or update a document, your Infovark it will capture it, and make it available on your local Infovark website. When it’s done, the web page it produces looks like this:
More than Tags
If you click on the picture above (opens in a new window),You can see that your Infovark has provided a text summary of the document, and also tagged the document with what it thinks are relevant keywords.
Infovark’s tags are a bit special, though. You can search for documents by tag, just like a Delicious or Technorati search. But Infovark also uses these tags to develop concepts it associates with your information and contacts. These concepts are used to suggest people you know or other useful email and documents.
You can see this in action with the related content panel, down the right hand side of the screen. So tagging is not just useful for you, but also improves the recommendations that Infovark makes.
You can edit the document summary, and provide more information about the document on this screen. You can add headers, pictures, links to other web pages within your Infovark site as well as on external sites using a friendly WYSIWYG editor. There’s no need to learn confusing wiki markup.
Visitors to this page can leave comments, download the file for themselves, or follow links to other relevant content. They can also rate the file or add tags to the page.
As you can see, Files are a hugely important part of how Infovark determines what you know. In our next post, we’ll look at email, and how it’s captured and shared.
Try the Infovark Beta
Yes! Infovark is…
And you can totally find it here.
Wait, wait!
We have a few important things to tell you before you get it.
The first is that the Beta works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and the Windows 7 release candidate. You’ll also need to have Office 2007, and particularly Microsoft Outlook, if you want to get the most out of the beta. You’ll also need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed. And that’s where the real wait comes in.
Seriously. Once you download the 137 MB Infovark installer, we’ll check for the latest version of the .NET Framework. If you don’t have it on your computer, we’ll install it for you, but it could take a good long while. So get yourself a cup of coffee. Or take a walk around the block. Or surf the Internet for a bit.
Once we’ve gotten the prerequisites out of the way, the rest of the Infovark installation is straightforward. We highly encourage you to click Next, Next, Next all the way to the Finish button. I mean, you could try some of the fancy settings, but… well, we’re not quite sure what will happen. If you try it, let us know how it goes.
Wait, wait wait!
We’re not done telling you about the Beta yet! I know you’re itching to check out Infovark, but there’s a few more things you need to know.
After the install finishes, Infovark will ask you a few questions. It’s basic stuff: Your name, email address, short bio, avatar. I’m sure you’re used to filling this stuff out from a dozen other web sites and applications. We just wanted to let you know that we don’t get a copy of that here at the Infovark Burrow. All that info will stay on your machine, where it belongs, unless you decide to share it.
When the interview finishes, Infovark will start digging through your files and email. Don’t worry — Infovark keeps everything it finds private, unless you tell it otherwise. You can also tell it to ignore certain folders on your computer or in your email. Check out this page to find out more about Infovark’s privacy and sharing settings.
This is where another wait might happen. Infovark does a good job of staying out of your way, but while it’s getting up to speed on all the fabulous work you’ve been doing lately, there won’t be much to see. This might be a good time for you to get lunch.
Once Infovark has gotten acquainted with your computer, you can start asking Infovark questions, using Infovark to take notes, sharing information with your coworkers, and lots of other neat stuff. Check out this page for a list of Infovark’s features.
One more thing
We want to hear from you! What were your first impressions? What confused you? What intrigued you?
We’re aware we’ve made something unusual. We have a hard time explaining it to ourselves sometimes, and we’ve spent two years working on it.
Mainly, we wanted to make a business application that helped people work with the information they use everyday. And we wanted to take a fresh approach to office software, combining some of the lessons of today’s Web 2.0 era to yesterday’s business tools.
So if it seems a bit weird, yeah, that’s totally our fault.
Just relax and play around with it a bit.
What are you waiting for?
