I recently wrote about how Wikipedia is changing how I search for information. If I’m seeking something topic-related, chances are I’ll start with Wikipedia to get an initial overview plus a rich source of community-filtered links that will provide more information.

There’s been all sorts of criticism levelled at Wikipedia, and comparisons made with the well-known encyclopedia Britannica. But to try and compare like-for-like is a ridiculous notion. Wikipedia may share a similar goal but is fundamentally different to Brittanica. If I’ve missed an episode of a TV show, I don’t go to Britannica to find out what happened… Similarly, I don’t expect Wikipedia to be the authoritative voice on any given subject. But, for me, the biggest plus points for Wikipedia are: its breadth of topics covered, the depth of skills and knowledge freely donated by contributors, and the freshness of the content.

These three plus points are what most business knowledge management systems are in desperate need of.

Whenever I visit a customer who has deployed Microsoft’s SharePoint Server (any version, from 2001 through 2007), the first thing I do is click through the hierarchy of topics the implementer will almost certainly have created as part of the deployment. And, almost always, at least 80% of the topics are empty. Why? Usually the reasons are simple. Nobody told anybody what the topic hierarchy is there for; There is no incentive to add content (failure to satisfy ‘what’s in it for me?’); The topic hierarchy doesn’t represent how people actually work or organise their content. A bit more delving into the deployment, and usually the content can all be found within SharePoint, stored and duplicated across a tangled-but-useful-mess of team and individual sites

SharePoint Server 2007 introduces wiki capabilities. That means, potentially, organisations can have their own little world of Wikipedia for sharing knowledge and expertise – let’s call it the KnowledgePedia.

When you create a new site in SharePoint, there is a wiki template available out-of-the-box:

Hey presto, you now have a wiki! In the image below, I’ve entered the first topic in my wiki – Project Trinity.

The wiki page follows standard wiki conventions. You have an Edit button up in the top left to put the page in Edit mode. Once in Edit mode, you can enter content using an in-browser editor. To link to other wiki pages, you surround them with double square brackets.

In this image, you can see that Project Trinity is surrounded by double square brackets. I have also entered a new page – New Starters Guide, also surrounded by double square brackets. The page has an in-browser editor, you can see the toolbar above ‘Welcome to Wikipedia2′ with icons for changing formatting, adding images and so on.

Clicking OK returns us to the view of the wiki page, with the new content displayed:

The New Starter Guide link is underlined because I have referenced a page that does not yet exist. Clicking on the link automatically opens up a new page ready to be created, with the name already filled in:

I can enter content immediately, and when I click ‘Create’, the new page is published. It’s as simple as that to start building a topic structure and sharing content. The pages also store version history so you can track changes made to the pages and who made them.

The technical piece is relatively straightforward, and really does require only a small amount of training to get people comfortable with editing the web pages. The harder part is getting people to contribute. Now, the Internet has proven that people are more than willing and able to share stuff without requiring either financial rewards or a cattle prod. As ably demonstrated by the likes of YouTube, Flickr and the various blogging platforms. How easy it is to create such an environment internally will depend on the culture of your organisation. Are people encouraged to talk, chat, share stories? If so, then encourage them to capture those thoughts in the wiki. If people are treated more like robots who are supposed to ask permission before taking a ‘comfort’ break, rewarded for task productivity, and where smiling is frowned upon, then building a useful knowledge repository will be a little more challenging… see previous posts – Seven productivity tips and Why is KM so difficult? for some more thoughts on that subject. But the main piece of advice is simple – let people decide what topics and content need to be included. Resist the temptation to create a managed hierarchy with formal look-and-feel and corporate standards. Let it be messy and organic and you will get a far closer representation of human knowledge being shared across the organisation.

…and never forget, we will always be only able to document a fraction of what we know in our heads. It’s still easier to show someone how to tie a shoelace than point them to a manual.

Related blog posts:

• d.SharePoint – Gimme a widget
• d.SharePoint – OurSpace
• Let’s make SharePoint Dirty
• Changing how I search
• Seven productivity tips
• Why is KM so difficult?
• Reading versus doing

Technorati tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, MOSS 2007

Update: Knowledge@Wharton has a blog post describing how Internet-based collaboration, like Wikipedia, can change how we do business

The Microsoft team blog made an announcement on 12th December regarding the Knowledge Network (KN) – a social networking tool that was due to ship as an add-on to SharePoint Server 2007. I wanted to call this out because I know people are still talking about KN as though it is a product that is going to ship this year, and figured perhaps they weren’t aware of the change in direction

The add-on is no longer going to be part of this version of SharePoint. Instead, a ‘technology preview’ will be available, intended for evaluation purposes only. The technology preview will not be a supported product

What does that mean? The likely reason is the technology simply isn’t going to be ready to ship any time soon, at least not in a stable format. Instead it will remain in development for release as part of the Office 14 release cycle (i.e. the next version)

Is it worth playing with the KN in its current form? The easy answer is ‘it depends’. (The short answer would be no). I’d recommend experimenting with the technology preview if you have the time and resource. It introduces an age-old concept in a new format – six degrees of separation. By exploring email trails between people, the KN can create a web of contacts, both internal and external to the organisation. When you do a search for information, you receive results based on the degrees of separation between you and the person with the knowledge. If the person is one degree away (i.e. you know each other), them you can contact them direct. If the person is 2+ degrees away, you can request an introduction via someone you know directly

I would be amazed/disappointed if Microsoft didn’t continue to develop this technology and further enhance it. How close the end result will compare with the current technology preview is anybody’s guess. I remember the early beta version of Windows Vista that was distributed at the Microsoft Profesional Developer’s (PDC) conference in 2003…

Related links:

• Announcement on the KN team blog regarding the KN release plan (12th December 2006)
• About the Knowledge Network (my previous blog post, June 2006)

Technorati tags: Knowledge Network; SharePoint 2007; MOSS 2007

For reference, d.SharePoint refers to SharePoint’s dirty twin. Oh, and we are talking about SharePoint Server 2007 in this series. Some of the ideas could be implemented on older versions of SharePoint (SharePoint Portal Server 2003) and/or by just using Windows SharePoint Services (part of Windows Server 2003)

One of the big Web 2.0 stories of 2006 was the phenomenal growth of MySpace. There were scandals and careers launched but, what really mattered, people shared ‘stuff’ on a scale never seen before. And the funniest part? I rarely meet an IT dept who thinks anyone in their organisation has even heard of MySpace. Where do they think all the users live? Mars?

For those who have never visited the land of MySpace, here’s a screenshot of a MySpace site:

Not much to it really – web page, with boxes that display various types of content and the ability to personalise the appearance of the page. (I know there are other features worth a mention but I’m trying to avoid turning this post into a book) This site is for the singer Lily Allen and includes a music player where you can listen to her songs, a calendar of her upcoming shows and some profile information.

So, if MySpace = people voluntarily sharing lots of stuff, and you want to increase knowledge sharing in your organisation, what could possibly be the solution? One option is to encourage everyone to create a site on MySpace… but if you don’t fancy the idea of your company knowledge being dumped on the Internet, how about doing it internally on SharePoint instead? Let’s call it OurSpace.

Granted, it’s not quite as psychedelic, but hey I created it in 5 minutes

SharePoint contains the technology – web pages with boxes that can display various types of content; the ability to create sites, lots of them; you can customise the appearance (colour scheme, page layout, how ‘stuff’ gets organised) and the ability to let the users control it all. Lots of standard admin can be automated – for example, if a user tries to access a site they don’t have permissions for, they can be presented with an email that will forward their access request to the owner of the site, they don’t have to go and fill in a form to get IT to do it for them.

The challenge is being prepared to let it all just happen…

…and that means trusting people to look after their space. Try applying lessons in managing the physical to manage the virtual.

You don’t remove all unused electrical sockets from office space just in case a user decides to bring in a DVD player and sit watching pornography at their desk. Instead, you have a company policy that (should) make it pretty clear what activities are likely to lead to being fired.

The same should apply to virtual space. Don’t worry about locking down SharePoint in anticipation of unacceptable uses. Do leave a link on the standard template pointing users to the company handbook that defines what is and is not acceptable or appropriate behaviour. Worried about Sarbannes-Oxley compliance or similar? Include a reference in the handbook. Clearly state what information would fall under compliance rules and require the owner sign an agreement to be responsible for the content on their site (you can even include the requirement on the web form used to create new sites).

Tips and Tricks:

Create some initial site templates populated with sample web parts and links to help people get started. Sponsor a couple of virtual teams and help them set up their sites, including their own colour schemes and layouts. Include handy hints for making it easy to find and share content. Include a link to OurSpace / Community / whatever you want to call it, in the top-level navigation of your intranet – make it easy to find and use

Use quota management to restrict people from overloading the servers. By restricting the maximum size of a site, and the maximum quantity of sites that can be created, you can ensure your database doesn’t run out of disk space. Depending on just how popular OurSpace becomes, you may need to scale the solution by starting a second site collection, and it may even require its own dedicated server/virtual server depending on the size of your organisation

Put good housekeeping procedures in place. For example, configure SharePoint to send out regular reminders to owners to confirm if their site is active or not, and automatically delete those who ignore reminders (the email can tell them this will happen). Those who hit their site quota can request additional space – you can decide if it is justified or not.

If people start dropping lots of content on to their community spaces, they may influence your corporate index (similar to how blogging results have been skewing Google’s search results). You can tweak the search settings within SharePoint to help maintain (and improve relevance). One element of ranking is click distance, determining relevance by how far a page is located from an authoritative site – others may call this Page Rank You can define which intranet sites are authoritative and also demote sites. If you don’t want community content to dominate your results, demote the Community site collection to reduce its relevance. A more extreme solution would be to not include OurSpace content within your corporate index – depends on how useful the content is to people.

These are just a few suggestions for getting started. If you want more details or help on how to implement OurSpace on SharePoint. If there is interest, I’ll flesh out this article into a step-by-step guide.

Technorati tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, MOSS 2007

Last week, at the SharePoint conference (and also the CEO Summit), Microsoft announced a new technology – Knowledge Network (KM) for Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS). What follows is an overview based on the session I attended (the presenter clearly stated we could blog at will ) with some personal comments added in. I have not installed the product and do not have access to it. Knowledge Network is currently a closed beta, so you won’t find it on the list when MOSS beta 2 is released. I played with a very early prototype of the client-side technology 2 or 3 years ago, when it was still in MS Research and I was still at Microsoft, but the product has changed significantly since then.

KN is focused on enterprise social networking, automatic discovery and sharing of undocumented knowledge and relationships. (I copied that off the opening slide…) So what does that really mean?

The solution involves client and server elements. The KN client is installed locally and analyses email content to create an individual profile of keywords and contacts (colleagues and external contacts). The user can review the profile – for example, set privacy levels on information (e.g. choosing only to share external contacts with your direct team) and remove information you don’t want published. The user then chooses to publish the profile and it is uploaded to the KN server, i.e. this is an opt-in model (until some evil being in I.T. enforces publishing through group policy…). As multiple user profiles are published to the KN server, they are aggregated to create expertise information and form a social network (i.e. the more profiles published, the richer the network). The MOSS search service indexes the information created by the aggregated profiles and it is returned within search results.

When a person (seeker) queries for people – who knows what/whom – the results are ranked by social distance to the seeker, expertise and relationship relevance (e.g.results grouped as ‘my colleagues’, ‘know my colleagues’… <– this is similar to the LinkedIn method of being able to link to people who are linked to people you know.) The KN server also includes a feature called ‘anonymous brokering’ – it is based on the privacy field in the KN profile manager and allows people to share information with the system, but only on demand.

If you are seeking expertise, you can submit a query and will be returned a set of people results without the contact information. If you want to contact one of the experts, you click on the link to send a message via the KN broker. The KN broker forwards the email to the expert (under its own email account) and the expert can choose to accept or decline the request. If the request is accepted, the seeker and expert are hooked up.

This feature demo’d well, but I suspect the technical implementation will be far easier than the cultural implementation. In smaller organisations, it will not be difficult to guess who the expert is even without the contact information. The culture of the organisation must make it acceptable to say no to requests without fear of penalty, otherwise everyone will just say yes (or not publish their expertise) and the service becomes irrelevant. There are some configuration options, such as how many times an individual can contacted with requests during a time period – useful, but again needs to be within a culture that allows experts to say no.

The individual profile is created client-side with no server involvement. In effect, the profile is an index of the content within Outlook (keywords and contact information are extracted from emails within Outlook folders and also contact lists in IM (I’m assuming that means Live Communication Server)). After the initial profile is published, incremental updates are sent at an interval defined in the configuration. The default is 14 days. <- this is a concern. Whilst people will likely be thorough in reviewing their profile prior to the initial publish, I suspect the novelty will soon wear off and they will start to accept the defaults for incremental updates. This could lead to sensitive information being published onto SharePoint without the source user realising.

KN is designed for Microsoft environments – it requires MOSS to install (Windows Server 2003, .NET framework 2.0, SQL 2000 or 2005) and requires Active Directory and Exchange for name resolution (contact information and DLs). The client will need to be running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or later and Office 2003 or later. The product group are already recommending that Outlook be configured with cached Exchange mode to minimise processing impact against the Exchange Server whilst inboxes are analysed to create/update the profile.

From a deployment perspective, KN is another shared service being added to MOSS (joining Excel services, Forms server, and Indexing/Search). As soon as a user elects to publish their profile to the server, the KN profile management web service takes over to calculate the expertise information and social network.

The session closed with a healthy Q&A that raised some interesting issues. A couple of specifics: Only the body of emails are indexed, not the attachments. The question was asked as to whether or not the ‘Deleted items’ folder was indexed, and I didn’t hear a clear answer. It poses an interesting challenge – how do you determine which emails contain relevant information. I delete irrelevant stuff immediately, but I delete everything eventually unless it has particular sentimental value. And that leads on to the age old challenge of auto-generating social networks based on emails we send/receive and searches we perform – how to determine when expertise is being shared versus discovery and learning versus spam (corporate as well as external) versus answering on behalf of etc. The product group are more than aware of this challenge. When asked why not mine stuff other than email (documents, IM conversations etc.) they responded that email is the richest in terms of tacit information as well as being the most pervasive source. They acknowledged that the challenge in calculating strength (relevance) was hard enough and adding data sources adds complexity, and decided the return was not worth the investment in this version (i.e. look out for extensions in the future…)

Closing notes:

Historically, organisations have been reluctant to deploy social software tools – IM being the most recent example of irrational fears over-riding business benefits (see related post: when will IM come of age). Knowledge Network will face similar challenges, as concerns over productivity drains, privacy and culture-fit bubble to the surface. That all said, I’m glad Microsoft has finally entered this space. The power of social networks have become well documented over the past 5 years, and failure to understand them is one of the primary reasons why most KM systems fail. This will be a v1 technology and will have all sorts of flaws and challenges. But it’s a great start and this sort of capability is long overdue.

For more information:

• Microsoft product team blog for Knowledge Networks
• Craig Randall has posted his thoughts (he attended both sessions at the SharePoint conference, I just went to the session covering the details)

If you’re interested in learning more about the potential value of social networks, there are plenty of books on the subject but here are three I would recommend for starters:

• The hidden power of social networks by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker (2004)
• Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (2003)
• Six Degrees by Duncan Watts (2003)

Update: An overview has been posted up on Microsoft’s web site: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver/kn.mspx complete with screenshots.