In this paper, KnowWeb, a European Commission funded research project, is briefly introduced. The project focuses on the storage of knowledge in corporate organizational memory and retrieval of relevant knowledge chunks from memory. Retrieval is based on company-specific conceptual terms instead of traditional keywords. The employed knowledge-based approach enables searching not only in physical document space but also in document context space. Flexible architecture that can be adopted by different SMEs with specific distributed environments in a simple and straightforward way is a necessary condition for success of such a system. Therefore, in addition to the knowledge modeling approach, the distributed architecture of our proposed system is described.