I wanted to write from a long time on OKM(Oracle Knowledge Management), since I provide technology solutions to call center department. Oracle Knowledge Management in laymen’s term is customized version of search engine to organizational need. It can provide searches across multiple sources, major examples are  word doc, PDF, excel , Social Media & knowledge articles.

From my recent reading & the way I see the code level packaging of the application, underlying application is from InQuira Inc. This product/Company was acquired by Oracle in 2011.It was further integrated with other Oracle products & was offered to customers as complete call center solution.

This product has multiple application types/Components(I have used application types & components interchangeably), which are needed to be installed together in order to work together. I got a chance to drive the complete setup for this product. I personally liked this product, since it provides information to agents on their finger tips based on their profile setup. As an organization if you have huge documentation & you are looking for contextual search with customized tuning then this is the product for you. It’s highly impossible to refer any unorganized documentation,while agent is answering customer inquiry.

Let us dive deeper into it, as per your business needs and how much your agents are comfortable in using reference documents during your call or answering an email based query ,you might have to go for Iconnect or Infocenter. Certainly there are some other components which are always needed for your Iconnect or Infocenter.  Below diagram will give you idea which components of product fits where & how they serve multiple needs.

Fig 1. High Level OKM Components

Let us explore one component or app type one at a time, let us assume for sometime your agents need to search relevant articles, documents within your call center agent facing application.

Iconnect

This is one of the way where your agents can perform the searches on the documentation. Iconnect can seamlessly work with Siebel Contact Center, RightNow & CRM OnDemand which I am aware of. I don’t see much of an issue in integrating them with other products also, since it uses a servlet based parameters and those can be passed from calling application,which is possible in most of the above applications.

The component internally uses runtimes to do get the search results on scored & ranked/tuned articles. Subsequently each activity and events are passed to event router, which will continuously log the user & system events in the staging database. I haven’t shown any DB in above diagram but will try to write another part where I will explain the deployment diagram in detail with all the system components.

This application can take multiple servlet parameters which calling application can pass to authenticate/authorize user along with search parameters. This application component is not for standalone queries or searches.

Infocenter

The code base for Infocenter & Iconnect is same in almost all the functionality but the UI is advanced for Infocenter. It has nice login screen with channel configured as per the user setup. I will come to channel part in later sections. This application serves the need of organization in case you have standalone contextual search needs.

Infomanager

Infomanager is one of the critical  piece of OKM application.Most of the  administrative activities are taken care through this component. Here are some of major activities you can carry in Infomanager & I have come across

• User management : – User setup, Group setup, Role setup
• Channel Creations
• Document/Article Management with workflow

Channels are nothing but grouping of documents,articles,alerts under certain categories & user searches can be limited to those groups. It also provides same search functionality as Iconnet and Infocenter.

Event router

This is JMS based application component which collects events from all the three application components,so that you send it to OKM analytics.

Conclusion

There are lot of logical components involved & they work together to make this as one application like intelligent Search.

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