Someone who authored a document on WAP will be ranked higher than someone who merely edited a document on WAP. The Discovery Server takes this sort of information a step further by tracking whether or not someone has linked to a document on WAP, how many documents they've read on WAP, whether or not they've responded to documents regarding WAP, how many times they've accessed documents on WAP, and if they've created a subscription to a category containing information on WAP technology.

The Discovery Server finds and organizes the dynamic relationships among information, people, and the activities of people to automatically pinpoint expertise, as well as to associate people with their interests and concerns.

Conclusion
The Lotus Discovery System will require a large investment to integrate. Even in a test environment, Lotus recommends a distributed implementation, with a minimum of two dedicated servers. The primary server would contain master configuration-associated databases. A secondary server would run K-station, profile updating, full text indexing, metrics, and spider tasks. There can only be one full text indexing server and only one metrics server. However, there can be any number of spider servers and any number of K-station servers in a Lotus Discovery System implementation.

Recommended server hardware for the Discovery Server includes a minimum of 10GB of disk space, 384MB of RAM, and a Pentium II 500 MHz processor. K-station also requires 10GB of disk space, a minimum Pentium II 300 MHz processor, and 256MB of RAM. Knowledge Discovery System pricing is $395 per user. Stand-alone K-station pricing is $120 per user with discounts for multiple users. Educational pricing is also available.

Jason Collier has more then four years of experience working with the Lotus family of products and is a Certified Lotus Professional in Application Development and System Administration for R4 and R5. Additionally, he's a Certified Lotus End-User Instructor. He can be reached at jcollier@ekmco.com.