What is University-in-a-Box?
UIB is built upon the solid foundations of Autonomy's award winning IDOL infrastructure, thus ensuring that the spectrum of Autonomy functionality is available through UIB. In particular, the use of the personalisation/profiling features together with hyper linking and summarisation ensures UIB provides a truly personalised experience. Whether this is from an information or a personal development perspective, UIB tailors its responses to meet individual needs.
Community perspective
UIB actively helps to form and maintain communities of interest
within an organisation. It has been demonstrated that communities
of interest/practice are one of the best means of capturing and
disseminating company best practice. UIB allows the creation of
communities and the assignment of a community administrator for
each. The community administrator authorises users into the
community, maintains the community home page, and creates community
channels (a pre-defined dynamic and filtered stream of
information).
UIB offers other features to support community sharing such
as instant messaging, community forums and useful people windows.
We have made the capturing, retrieval and sharing of best
practice very easy. Templates are used to capture best practices
that are then indexed into the system (perhaps after a quality
review check based upon your internal processes). These are made
available for retrieval through specific searchs, and can be
returned as part of an 'information set' to a user seeking to solve
a particular problem.
UIB is unique because it can monitor and understand the
preferences of identified users and then automatically bring them
together into a community of interest. In an extended or
international organisation, this provides a way to bring together
key workers who might never have met or known about each other, but
who can form a virtual community to share and solve common problems
together.
Personal perspective
UIB is focussed on delivering the right information to an
individual, whether this is the result of a search query or
investigating a personal development need. By providing a profile
(which can shared if desired) to UIB, information retrieved is
filtered ensuring only relevant information is returned. Therefore,
UIB delivers the right result in the right context. A user can
submit, in plain English, an enquiry and UIB will draw on all of
its information and content sources (e.g. news feeds, company
reports residing on internal shared drives, e-learning content,
best practice information - in fact any trusted source of
information or content that can be connected to electronically) and
present the individual with the most relevant solution.
Other personal support features include the ability to create
an individual working environment through the creation of working
pages (tabs) and the facilities/information that is contained on
them. This can reflect the way an individual works to maximise
their effectiveness.