Last Fall I spoke with David Gilmour, CEO at Tacit, about their new offering illumio. I found it a new genre of enterprise 2.0 application and referred it as a Smart Content Filter that also offers Enhanced Collaboration and Content Sharing. Recently we spoke again. Now they have transformed their interface to better reflect their functionality. They have changed from a Windows style application to a web-based newspaper style. See an example below.

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You can see that there is a central column with stories and side bars with other items. Let’s look at the central column first. The articles that appear are drawn from the feeds that you or your group select. Their prominence is determined by how well they match your profile, which is based on your actions as before. As with the previous version selections and prominence is determined by your current concerns: illumio indexes such sources as your sent mail folder, your documents, and your web browsing, and keeps the index local and private. You can adjust these indexing sources. For you will need to download and install a plug-in to allow for this monitoring. The web version will work off the interests you type in, and feedback from articles you’ve read, but will not automatically create your profile from scratch the way the plug-in does.

Working off your RSS feeds, illumio abstracts the key themes from each new article and compares them to your profile. The RSS feeds can be blogs, wikis, mainstream press, etc. It acts like a smart content filter and the new interface better reflects this task. You can also help to improve the results by rating what is returned and the quality of the match.

In the right column are questions from your group(s). They appear as of they were classified ads from others seeking your knowledge. The best questions for you are unique to your front page, but you can browse all questions from the “Questions” tab. When someone sends out a question or request for help, illumio picks the most relevant person to respond based on their current activity. This is all done behind the scenes in an automated mode. The most relevant person is asked first. It could be you and, if so, the question will appear in your side bar. If you ignore the question, the requester never knows this, protecting the fact that you ever matched it. The request is then automatically made visible to those who don’t match quite as well, while also protecting the privacy of the sender until someone responds. This avoids broadcast help requests that can overload email inboxes and result in multiple, often redundant, replies. Below you see more detail on the questioning process.

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To participate in the news and questions you need to be part of a group. These groups can be public or private. The public ones are free and the private ones work on a paid subscription basis. Visit the illumio Team Blog, as well as their web site, to get further updates on the application. There is a story on the blog on their New Release of illumio – Your Personalized Newspaper, as well as their Advanced RSS Filtering Features. In the latter case you can filter out the group feeds that are not within yours interests without having to drop the entire group. I think this interface transformation is a great addition to a useful tool. It is a greater representation of the value they bring as a smart filter of whatever you want to monitor on the web or within the enterprise.