The rapid growth and management of information and knowledge within organisations is an on-going challenge faced by most IT departments. It certainly is not an easy task managing and providing consolidated access to multiple repositories, knowledge and content pools.

Most organisations' information and knowledge are in the form of structured and unstructured data, residing within databases, storage media, file systems, libraries, and/or specific enterprise application repositories. The most daunting task faced by most firms is the distribution, update and management of all these contents across their business.

Many multi-site organisations manage this task by creating an information pool that replicates itself from one location to another on a regular basis. Although this approach can be effective, it introduces unnecessary strain on the infrastructure, requires careful management of the frequency of updates and impacts upon the reliability of the firm's infrastructure – to name just a few of the drawbacks.