An advanced collaboration system combines communications channels and team rooms with the organization’s knowledge base. The leading collaboration architectures today are enterprise systems of team rooms that “sit inside” the knowledge base. Here, in enterprise 2.0 terms of user-driven content, team rooms are born, developed, and, sometimes, die (to be archived) as a consequence of people naturally adding, changing, deleting stuff in context while just doing their everyday jobs.

In an integrated knowledge data infrastructure, the team’s work both draws on and contributes to the organization’s knowledge base as a normal part of everyday operation. For example, a document created by the team in its room is completely contextualized (why, who, what, when). The document is simultaneously being managed by the underlying knowledge infrastructure that (1) provides backup, versioning, and permission services (which enables a team to keep it, relatively speaking, private in draft stages) while (2) tags it with organizational categories as part of a larger knowledge universe that the document will eventually enter.

This is a double benefit to the ongoing and evolving organizational intelligence. A document or datum of any sort is stored once, categorized both in the context of its creation (the team) and its place in the organizational information taxonomy, then available for unlimited reuse.