I was reading this blog entry on Ross Mayfields weblog and it got me thinking about how today most enterprises seems to tuck their enterprise knowledge away in a word document or excel file, save that file to a public network share somewhere in hope that someone else will discover it at some later date and find it useful. Sometimes people will save a file into their home directory outlining some important information about a project – thats almost like completely giving up on the information infrastructure.

Looking around at the tools in use today in the enterprise. We predominantly have a file based infrastructure, even with tools like (and I’m going to be unashamedly Microsoft-specific here) SharePoint, you are really creating containers to dump files in. But what if that word document wasn’t really just a file? What if it was part of a much larger virtual document and you were only contributing or viewing a tiny little part of it?

Companies like Socialtext are really starting to drive this concept into the enterprise and I wonder how long before application suites like Microsoft Office are going to be forced to take notice. When Microsoft released OneNote I was extremely excited, and I still am – but I want more. Take this list of tools:

  • Outlook
  • OneNote
  • InfoPath
  • Word
  • Excel
  • PowerPoint
  • Internet Explorer

Its your typical Windows desktop environment – except for perhaps OneNote and InfoPath which aren’t quite as widely deployed. All of these applications stand alone with some room for integration (like embedding a chart from a spreadsheet in Word and e-mailing it to a collegue). But they still lack real integration – and there is nothing else on the market out there that does IMHO.

What if the Notes folder in Outlook actually opened up OneNote? What if the OneNote store was distributed – by default so that by refering to another “note node” by name it automatically created a link to it and I could encourage content creation by leaving launch sites for additions (Wiki’s do this fantastically well today). What if I wanted to do research on a particular subject I could draw a window inside OneNote and inside the Window dive into Internet Explorer and explore the web – in situ. When I was done I could “freeze frame” the page I was on so that others could see where I went (content replication). What if when you received an InfoPath form via e-mail it automatically opened it in the preview window for you to fill out and send (workflow out of the box).

All of this is within reach – the technology is available today, it just needs to be tied together.