University-in-a-Box (UIB) is GateWest New Media's flagship knowledge and learning portal and has been developed to occupy the space where Knowledge Management and e-Learning converge.

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.