Microsoft with Corporate Search and Knowledge Networks
Microsoft is re-entering the enterprise search market but this time following a strategy more similar to Google’s who has become the second largest search provider in less than three years. They’re targeting the lower end of the market with a simpler search solution that integrates with sharepoint server. The search binds together separate search solutions and allows employees to search their PCs, corporate intranets and websites and have the results appear on the same interface.
Microsoft has a key advantage over Google and the other enterprise search providers in that it can tightly couple its search product with sharepoint server and its other search tools. Granted, the company has had mixed success with this is strategy in the past, but if Microsoft is truly able to create a seamless search, browse and collaborate experience, it may gain significant traction.
One interesting feature about the new search tool is a functionality called Knowledge Networks. The tool automatically collects and publishes information on an employees’ skills and knowledge so that finding people based on their expertise more efficient by searching automated profiles. While the tool is probably powerful, I wonder how many companies will adopt it. An automated tool that tells you who are the smartest people in your company on a specific subject can upset other employees.
At this rate, should we expect to have tools that analyze our inboxes, documents folders, keyboard strokes and application use to determine how productive we have been in the previous year? Will these tools then tell our HR departments how large a bonus we should be receiving? Technology can be frightening.
Read Bill Gates’s comments at the Microsoft CEO summit where he discusses the new search product. Gates emphasized the “digital workstyle” which in everyday language is a vision for the future of work weaving together top down and bottom up technologies in the workplace. He also discussed how knowledge workers were often frustrated with top down technologies like CRM systems as they were too inflexible.
