Yeah, but you still run into the same old story of issues with discovery -- How do you know something's been added inside the file cabinet if you're looking at the closed drawer?

A knowledge sharing app sitting on top of a search appliance would show activity and interaction across content.

While people may just want to be able to find stuff in their great big pile of content, they'll still run into obstacles with only a search appliance. It's the connections between pieces of content that really count for understanding that pile (e.g. me as a user and all of my content, related to the document you were looking for that I published, related to a new document that you need but never knew you needed, etc.).

A search appliance would be great, but there's not really a lot of structure on top of an index unless coupled with some other sort of knowledge-management infrastructure.

http://www.yakabod.com/ is a company that I've heard about that has been doing this kind of thing for the US intelligence agencies for a while -- coupling a search appliance with taxonomy / folksonomy and some other kinds of voodoo. I've heard these guys refer to it as a "knowledge network" in the sense that a social networking app keeps you aware of what your friends and colleagues are doing, but the knowledge networking app keeps you aware of what your whole business is doing.

There's always Sharepoint and Documentum type solutions, but trust me, brother, I've been down those roads before and I don't wish them on my enemies.