Knowledge Network for SharePoint 2007

Announced yesterday at the CEO Summit, Knowledge Network is a free download for Office SharePoint Server 2007. This starts to answer a question I have had from customers many times over the past few years who want to better way to find experts within their organisation. One that springs to mind immediately is a bank who wanted to enable their call centre operators to be able to find an expert to be able to hand over a call to when the questions from the customer went beyond the script they had. For example, they wanted to be able to find someone qualified to provide mortgage advice who wasn’t already busy with a customer. They set off building a solution based on a skills database they needed to be kept up to date and Live Communications Server to track availability.

Now Knowledge Network begins to help by analysing the emails you send and who you interact with to intelligently indentify your skill set.

Here’s a couple of screenshots. This one shows the automated profile that is built once the KN analysis is complete.

This one shows how you can manage your own profile so that information you want to remain private to you or confidential to your team stays that way.

More information here: https://www.microsoft.com/livesearch/kn/default.mspx