Hart, who has been beta testing Illumio since June, hasn’t made the final decision whether to recommend it for use at Procter & Gamble. He’d like to do a bit more testing. "We believe Illumio might solve the problem if we could get a large percentage of the organization to install a desktop search utility and use it," Hart says.

"You have to ask if the tool will fit in your corporate culture," he says. Ultimately, success will depend on how willing employees are share the information that Illumio digs up, he adds.

Solve Document Dilemmas

One of the driving forces behind Web 2.0 is the virtual office—teams of far-flung experts collaborating online to create a whole greater than the sum of its contributors. When Denise Senter-Loyola, a principal with business consultancy Milestone Group, needed to get her virtual marketing and sales team members to collaborate on creating some key documents, she first used a Web-based intranet for document management. That failed as content grew and folder hierarchies became cumbersome. Soon, team members stopped contributing content. "People gave up because they had to log on and make all of the decisions about categorizing," Senter-Loyola says.

Finding the most recent version of a document required extra work as well—resulting in productivity losses and missed deadlines when team members mistakenly worked from the wrong version of a document.

She found a better take on Web-hosted document management in Koral, a newly released Web-based tool that lets users share and collaborate on documents from any location. Koral is notable because it does much of the heavy KM lifting for you, categorizing documents and notifying collaborators of new versions automatically.

When you upload files to your team’s private Koral workspace, the service searches them and suggests tags—categories you’ll use later to find documents relating to a particular subject. And borrowing from another Web 2.0 buzz technology, Really Simple Syndication, Koral doesn’t wait for you to come looking for documents it knows you’re interested in. Subscribe to a particular document, and Koral notifies you when it is updated. Subscribe to a team member (or a person with expertise similar to yours), and it notifies you when that person publishes new documents to the workspace.

"Because of the nature of our work, it caught on virally," says Senter-Loyola, who has been using a prerelease version of Koral for about three months and plans to upgrade to access some of the enterprise-level permission features. There is no end user license fee for Koral, but the company plans to charge between $15 and $45 per user per month for access to the enterprise-level editing and security controls. Koral also integrates with Salesforce.com via Salesforce’s AppExchange platform.