An appliance built to eliminate five common knowledge-sharing obstacles reportedly is being launched by Frederick, Maryland-based Yakabod.

 

Officials at the company say they’re releasing Version 3.0 of the Yakabox Knowledge Network, a workgroup collaboration system used since 2003.

“We’ve poured five years of time, effort and passion into the Yakabox,” says CEO Scott Ryser (pictured right), “and nearly 20,000 users in the intelligence community prove every day that it outperforms clunky, traditional knowledge management and collaboration.

 

It has an interface described by company officials as “so intuitive that users are productive the first time they log on,” which “deploys up to ten times faster than traditional knowledge management products.”

 

Here’s a visual description from Yakabod officials of how a knowledge network looks:

 

 

Last week, Yakabod added two senior executives to its leadership team. Chris Coleman, executive vice president of marketing, and Ken Foxton, vice president of national intelligence programs, will “focus on growing market share for the Yakabox,” Yakabod officials said.

 

“Seventy percent of KM initiatives fail for five reasons,” says Ryser. “They take too long to deploy, they’re too hard to secure, they’re a bear to integrate or they’re functional dead-ends. But usually it’s because people can’t, or won’t, use the systems.”

 

The Yakabox Knowledge Network meets National Security Agency (News - Alert) Protection Level 3 security requirements.

 

“Program managers who’ve had a sneak preview of Yakabox 3.0 get it right away,” says Ryser. “The user experience is as intuitive as e-mail. Most important, stuff that matters doesn’t disappear into a black hole when you need it most.”

 

The system “learns” which topics, events and categories each team member deems relevant, then delivers that information to the desktop Activity Viewer, company officials say, adding that “unlike data-centric architectures, the Yakabox captures soft knowledge, the experiences and insights teams generate every day, then lose in shared drives and in-boxes.”