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Correlate All Your Information

Don't surrender to information overload before you check out this $199 corporate tool.

Anne Fischer Lent, special to PC World

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In some corporations, you can actually see information overload oozing from individual PCs and seeping into every corner of the organization.

Sound all too familiar? Take a look at Correlate 1.0, a $199 tool designed to help you organize data from different sources.

Correlate creates a single compound document containing resources that can be shared over the Web or posted to the company intranet. When you open the program, you get a desktop interface with templates, called Solutions, for financial, manufacturing, marketing, travel, and other projects. If you want to custom-design a Solution you can opt for a blank page.

Going the template route is a lot like filling in an outline. The templates help you organize the data you want to share in a logical fashion.

You can type directly on the page or drag and drop an image or text from the Web. You can open Windows Explorer with just a click of a button and drag any desktop file to the Correlate page. Use the E-mail button to display e-mail folders, then drag specific messages to your page. You can insert hyperlinks. And you can pull over contacts and tasks from Microsoft Outlook (although there is no Outlook button).

The result is a Correlate Knowledge Map. Once you've dragged all the images, data, or links to your Knowledge Map, you can send this document via e-mail or share it across a network. Everyone who receives it can move from text to graphics to the Internet--wherever you lead them.

Additionally, Correlate can update the information for you at the touch of a button. This allows you to synchronize data in the company's database or update Internet search results.

Password capability provides security, and many customization options are available.

Plays Nicely with Others

Correlate works with Windows 95 and later versions of the OS, and supports common desktop applications such as Microsoft Office, standard databases, and planning and document-management software. On the browser front, it currently supports only Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, but it will support a Netscape browser later this year. Correlate takes up 5MB of hard drive space and demands at least 8MB of memory (you'll be happier with much more).

Correlate could be a boon to corporations grappling with information overload. Even if you have a document-management solution in place, you'll appreciate its ability to deliver just the information needed to tackle a specific task.

Whether you call the process information mining, harvesting, or correlating, Correlate can help you get a grip on information before the load becomes too great.

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