Dropbox, Inc.

Askme Corporation

Stephen Eisner

Vinod Valloppillil

Tony Xu

Royce Ausburn

Zach Johnston

Sergei Vorobev

Kevin Grey

Narmada Jayasankar

Alexandra Harris

Blake Lucchesi

Waqas Sheikh

Panagiotis Athanasiou

Haichen Liu

Ramesh Parameswaran

Anthony B Small

Digvijay S Chauhan

The disclosed technology addresses the need in the art for providing workflow controls to shared content items stored on client devices, and enforcing content item check outs or content item locks for shared content items stored and accessed on client devices. The present technology further includes automatically locking a shared content item that is edited on a client device so that other team members cannot modify the content item. Accordingly, the present technology improves upon existing systems that provide workflow controls such as file check-in and checkout functionality by permitting users to access content items directly from the file system of their client device, and by providing automatic checkout and check-in functionality.

Workflow functions of content management system enforced by client device

Workflow function of content management system enforced by client device

An enhanced knowledge management system ('KMS') is provided. The enhanced KMS provides a customizable, person-to-person, knowledge sharing portal that manages concurrent one-on-one conversations between requesters and expert resources. Through the knowledge sharing portal, the KMS provides the automatic capture, organization, and reuse of tacit knowledge, as well as integration with existing systems that manage already documented (explicit) knowledge. Example embodiments provide a Conversation Manager, which manages communication in the form of conversations (question and answer sequences) between users (requesters) and experts (expert resources), and allows system administrators to customize the system. Conversations are organized by subject matter categories and experts are ranked preferably by the system and by users, thereby increasing the likelihood of the KMS providing answers to users' questions. The Conversation Manager, in conjunction with managing these conversations, produces a dynamic knowledge base of knowledge that is searchable by other users. In this manner, the KMS enhances the ability in a multitude of environments to capture previously untapped knowledge and to integrate such knowledge with existing data.

Method and system for enhanced knowledge management

Growing community of inventors

Seattle, WA, United States of America

Stephen Eisner