I was reading the following article: Content, KM tools collaborate, which appeared in this week's Infoworld. The article reports on how iManage, a company which develops collaboration and Knowledge Management software, integrated its latest version into Microsoft Office software. The article refers to this phonomenon as a "growing trend".

The use of Office as platform for collaboration is not new, we all use "track changes" and "comments" in our daily lives. This article took me back to the time when Office XP was released.

Just around the time of Windows Office XP release in mid-2001, I was quite excited about one feature of this office productivity software from Microsoft's stable: the Smart Tags. As everybody watching the knowledge and information management technologies, believed that the Smart Tags, was the one technology which set the Office XP apart from its earlier versions. Besides, there was quite a buzz about Smart Tags bringing office closer to the "smart and intelligent" knowledge and information management system.

Smart Tags promised a host of goodies:

* Smart Tags would allow Office users to navigate from a office document to anywhere else inside the computer or to the network or to the Internet.

* Through Smart Tags, the users would able to create a context to the information they are writing or using. By adding Smart Tags with just one right click of their mice. For instance, John Lee could be smart tagged as a name and Bangalore as a city, John Lee then could be linked to a profile of Mr John Lee and the city of Bangalore could link to the suppliers in Bangalore or even to the map of Bangalore.

* The Office XP users could buy or download Smart Tags from a Microsoft affiliate (e.g, LexisNexis for legal services or Expedia for travel services) or create their own Tags.

* Microsoft also provided a developers kit so that developers could create solutions based on this new technology, exploiting the XML capabilities offered in Office XP.

For any body working in the field of information and knowledge management, it promised a new beginning. Now it seemed one could, in fact, create an information management solution from the most ubiquitous of all softwares, Word or Excel, virtually turning the Office space into a collaborative knowledge space.

Given my interest in Taxonomies and their use in the business environments, for me Smart Tags were an invisible manifestation of business taxonomies. With Smart Tags one could build or incorporate a business taxonomy in Word or Excel with a possibility of providing just-in-time and "actionable" information to knowledge workers.

Microsoft in its latest versions of Office software (Office 11) promises more extentions of Smart Tags, but some how I feel that people never realized the potential of this technology.

Of course, we can always blame this on the fate of the technology industry!