Industry Update No. 3: GMB Research & Development

Last week I spoke with John Simeon, Sales Director for Asia-Pacific at GMB Research & Development, who briefed me on the upcoming launch of their new KnowledgeOne (K1) product, which is set to be released in July. GMB, headquartered in Sydney, Australia, has a twenty year history in the information management field and is well known for its RecFind product (which K1 replaces - more on this). GMB has over 500 customers in Australia and also has a presence in New Zealand, North America, the United Kingdom.

In an exciting development for GMB, K1 replaces RecFind which has its last planned major update at the beginning of the year. I say replace, because GMB emphasis that K1 isn't simply a rebadging of RecFind. Existing RecFind customers will be able to move over to K1 as an upgrade, while still continuing to have access to the same functionality. User profiles will mean that users will only see the functionality they need and are permitted to use. However, those that decide to tap into the new functionality will be able to do a lot more by using K1 as a platform for a broader range of information and knowledge management tasks.

John explained that out-of-the-box K1 can be used to provide customer relationship, human resource and helpdesk functions. The key benefits for organisation doing this is that they can reduce the number of separate applications being used while also allowing data to be better integrated. In this respect, one of the K1 features John described that really interested me is the availability of a wizard that will allow superusers to further customise K1 in terms of look and feel, but also the ability to add and remove data fields. Some of the other technical features of K1 are that is developed in .Net, is browser-based, has multilingual capabilities and integrates with Active Directory.

We also spoke a little about GMB's e-mail archiving solution, called GEM. Recognising that user behavior can be a barrier to dealing effectively with e-mail content, GEM is able to automate e-mail capture using programmable filters and workflow. GEM works with Exchange, Domino and Groupwise.

In the next industry updates I'll be reporting on Crux Cybernetics and Grouputer.

Disclaimer: Information on this site is of a general nature. Please seek advice for specific circumstances. Unless otherwise stated, please assume that I have no commercial relationship with the vendors or products discussed.

Previous Industry Updates:

• Update No.1: Pivot Software
• Update No.2: Objectify