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 organizations 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 organizations and communities. Successful Knowledge Management often leads to vast cost savings or to new sources of income.

ERP5 KM has been designed for organizations and communities with a large number of people or high amount of information. In such demanding environments, technologies such as Enteprise Wiki or Enteprise Content Management do not always perform well enough, either for technical reasons or management reasons.

Based on benchmarking of existing KM solutions in large organizations, 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 millions of users and hundreds million pages. They support multilingual environments, including Asian languages such as Japanese or Chinese.
• Contributing to ERP5 KM is intuitive and ubiquitous. It requires no additional effort at the end of the day and is based on standard Office formats (ex. DOC, ODT, XLS, ODS, PDF, HTML, etc.). Automatic classification and categorization 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 organizations such as banking, government 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 complete traceability and certification of information through versionning, staging, historicization 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 into consideration the pre-existent diversity of technical solutions such as Wiki, CMS, file servers, mailing lists in large organizations and the requirement to provide a value-added unified access to all information without modifying existing solutions.
• Transversality is encouraged in ERP5 through multi-faceted publication of information and through a strong focus on communities and business processes.

Intention and Creation

ERP5 KM has been designed as a tool for management support rather than alternative to management. We believe that Knowledge Management can only succeed in an environment with well defined intentions in terms of business objectives and in terms 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 several straightforward features to a large number of users rather than on showing off many fashionable features and gadgets to 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.

Successfully Deployed

ERP5 KM has been deployed successfully by organizations 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 thousands. It can support thousands of contributing users and communities of consistent of millions of 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 an innovative way to solve common problems of multi-faceted publication in a light and straight-forward 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 organizations, etc.
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): ERP5 KM can be integrated with incorporated information systems (ex. SAP, Oracle, J2EE, etc.) through standard compliant protocols such as XML-RPC or SOAP.
  

See following How-To in order to understand how to install an ERP5 application.