Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Knowledge Network in SharePoint Server 2007 ...

I found this interesting piece of information in an article about Microsoft's CEO summit -

Microsoft also showed a technology called "Knowledge Network," which will use techniques from social networking software to help people connect with others and find experts on particular subjects within their own companies.
For example, it looks at a person's contacts and reporting relationships to find commonalities among different people. It also scans e-mails for keywords that indicate connections between different people -- even to point out basic conversation starters such as common interests. It's expected to be part of the upcoming version of Microsoft's SharePoint Server program.
Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager in Microsoft's Information Worker group, said the system will address privacy concerns by letting people choose whether and how to participate, in addition to letting them control the information that's scanned and viewable to others.


Anybody care to comment?

Update: I just found a posting on Philip Weats blog, giving more details:

Microsoft just publicly released information on their enterprise social networking software – Knowledge Network.

This is an Outlook plug-in that scans for expertise and social connections in email and a server component that displays the information in a discoverable and searchable manner.

The Microsoft team has done a lot of work making sure that users are in control of what information is gathered (items marked personal or confidential are not shared, and the user reviews all information before it’s uploaded to the server) and to make it seamless with the SharePoint server that collects the information (it’s tied into both search and the public MySite view.) Look for a lot more information as we start kicking the tires on it in Beta 2!





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