The Network Effect of MOSS plus KN

We’ve seen some comments (and the last guest Blog entry) that articulate the challenges of a network-effect product like KN, such as how to achieve critical mass of adoption to make the people search results valuable. This is something we noted very early on in our research before building KN. The response to this concern is that MOSS+KN have done a great deal of work to enable expertise location and people search scenarios automatically. Without a single user uploading a KN profile or manually touching their My Sites, MOSS already contains a very rich set of data about people from mining the Active Directory including employee titles, departments, and Distribution List memberships and determining who knows who by mining the organizational hierarchy. For example, just today I uncovered a helpful connection to a group by typing in one keyword, then sorting by title, then looking at “Find People Who Know this Person”. All of this was accomplished for a group and some individuals who have not yet installed KN. It is true that each person who contributes a profile makes the system so much richer. But, with MOSS + KN, users who have not yet become members can benefit, members benefit even more, and the more people that load the KN client and upload their profile, the more people that have an enhanced personalized experience interacting with the system.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2006
  Where can I download the beta2 TR version of KN install from?
• Anonymous
  September 29, 2006
  Knowledge Network Technical Refresh is now available on Betaplace for those organizations that already have access to the Microsoft Betaplace site. See today's blog entry for more information about navigating to KN on Betaplace.