Microsoft in entering the social network analysis tool space with Knowledge Network that will work with Sharepoint 2007. As the related Knowledge Network Tean Blog says, “Knowledge Network is designed to help you discover your own social capital as well as get a more complete understanding of skills that you have. Then it enables you to publish your profile so that others in the organization may find you as well as give you the opportunity to find others that you may need to connect with to achieve your goals. Because in today’s business it’s all about connections.”
It is still in Beta and only available now to those who have access to SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 on the Microsoft Betaplace site. I guess you will know if you are in this category. The rest of us have to wait. The Knowledge Network Tean Blog has some good posts on the tool and social network analysis in general. SNA has really become mainstream, at least Microsoft is labeling their tool to be in this space so they see the market potential. But what functionality does it have?
The blog says that KN works to create employee profiles this way. It "automatically generates a profile for each member from their e-mail it automatically extracts your keywords including noun phrases and your key contacts (both internal and external). Then once the profile is generated you have the chance to review it. You can add or delete any elements in your profile." Then, "periodically (the default is every 14 days) you receive an e-mail that shows the net new contacts and keywords you’ve used in the last two weeks and sends you an e-mail with that information broken out by keywords, contacts and external contacts." Now this may be a useful function but it does compare to the full featured SNA tools available. I am sure there must be more and I look forward to finding out the other things it can do.
Thanks to Mauro Cardarelli for pointing this out.
Comments