Well the time has come to bring our Knowledge Network Technical Preview to a close. We thank all of you who tried it out and provided us with great feedback and accolades. It is rewarding to work so hard on something and to see the fantastic results that...

The question came up, "what's new with this release of KN?" And so here's the answer, in addition to being more stable, which is the main goal of most subsequent releases, it adds the list below. As a Release Candidate, hence the designation "RC0" this...

Hello KN fans, this is a bit of a mea culpa, in our enthusiasm for having an RC0 build we rushed to put it up on our download site and unfortunately it caused some difficulty for people downloading this awesome technology. Well here’s the good news, not...

It's me again, the Marketing guy from the Knowledge Network for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 team. We have released our first candidate (RC0) for our final build of KN. To access the new build login to the Microsoft Connect site ( https://connect...

To paraphrase the great writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated!” Okay, so I am the guy who is responsible for bringing Knowledge Network (KN) to market. KN will be released as a technical...

So…we’re not a big company, but we’re bigger now than we were before “the crash.” We have offices in 5 cities and we’re actually two companies under one parent. But we’re not BIG, like Microsoft big, I mean, on a good day, I can still hit Hoody in the...

We’ve updated the KN release plan and wanted to post some details. We’re planning on releasing KN in the first half of calendar year 2007 as a Technical Preview rather than as a supported product feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. As a Technical Preview, KN will still be available to customers as a web download at no additional cost and will include documentation and community support. It won’t, however, be supported or covered by standard product support services or warranties. ...

Read this blog entry to see the software and hardware requirements for KN on the client and server ends....

We have now opened availability of the Knowledge Network Technical Refresh (KN TR) for selected organizations on our new Microsoft Connect site. The KN TR bits are available for self-support only which means the KN team is not available to support you in your evaluation. If you are interested in the KN team considering your organization for gaining access to the KN TR, please use the Contact Us button at the bottom of this blog and we’ll get back to you with a set of questions. ...

Highlights from customers' and strategists' experiences including how KN can help manufacturing customers....

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Knowledge Network (KN) Technical Refresh for those organizations that already have access to the Microsoft Betaplace site. The software, as well as related documentation, is available for download from Microsoft Betaplace. Once you get to the main page on Microsoft Betaplace, you can follow the link for Knowledge Network that can be found by following the “Other Files” link under the “Beta Downloads” node in left navigation bar. From there you can follow the instructions to download the actual files for the software and associated documentation. This latest release comes with a number of new enhancements and features. This blog entry contains a quick rundown of the key areas that been enhanced in this release. ...

For those of you whom already have access to SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 on the Microsoft Betaplace site (and therefore also have access to KN) here are some deployment considerations for the upcoming KN TR: As you get ready to deploy the Knowledge Network...

To address the the challenges of a network-effect product like KN, MOSS+KN offer a great deal of value 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. ...

The KN team has been gathering feedback from KN customers who are evaluating the KN beta within and outside Microsoft. We asked one of the many insightful evaluators, Patrick, a Software Development Engineer in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft (who we did not know before he joined the beta) to write a guest blog entry. Patrick shares some of the good, the bad and the ugly from his KN evaluation experience....

Don Cambell of Channel 9 interviewed me (John Hand) and Glen Anderson about KN. We talk about “big brother” but more importantly I demo KN. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=231223

This week, Glen Anderson focuses on the server side of the KN solution, decribing how KN integrates with the people-related components of Office SharePoint Server 2007. He expands the topic to cover five ways that KN enriches and extends Office SharePoint Server 2007: 1) enriching and extending the My Site with inferred keywords, richer colleagues, and external contacts, 2) supercharging expertise search with inferred keywords, 3) finding connections to internal people, 4) finding connections to external people and organizations, and 5) enabling members to moderate the usage of their profile information through the anonymous brokering....

Glen Anderson, the Group Program Manager for the KN team, describes the sources of information that KN client analysis looks at in order to create the best possible profile recommendations for you including the fields in the headers of your actual email interactions with others, Active Directory and SharePoint 2007. Glen also talks about KN keyword generation algorithms, Outlook rules and more....

Glen Anderson, Group Program Manager for the KN team describes KN and Desktop Search, how in KN V1 there is no dependency between the KN analysis engine and the Windows Desktop Search indexing engine. Then he describes how, although KN and Windows Desktop Search seem very similar on the surface, the requirements are quite different. Glen presents how the KN analysis process consists of four distinct steps from a logical perspective. He also describes the differences between the performance characteristics of KN analysis and Desktop Search, and mentions improvements in the performance of the KN analysis process....

KN and how you can enhance your career assets. Each of us possesses two fundamental assets that we bring to work each day; what we know or our expertise and who we know or our social capital. We get hired into a role based on what we know. These are the skills and capabilities that we either learned in school or through job experience. These are the things that we typically put on our resumes. However, we get promoted for the most part by getting things done, and getting things done is directly related to how we interact with others. Career tips, survivor style are included in this post. ...

For those of you that are subscribers to Microsoft SharePoint Advisor , check out John Hand ’s latest Knowledge Management article entitled: Turn Search into Action with [you guessed it] Microsoft Knowledge Network. John wrote about KN from 3 perspectives...

Hello KN fans. We're happy to announce that we have released a new build of Knowledge Network software on BetaPlace that fixes a few problems that have been reported since our first Beta release. The issues fixed in this build include: An error...

Today’s blog entry is again brought to you by me, John Hand. As the Senior Marketing Manager for Knowledge Network I regularly give formal presentations either in person or via another one of our great products, LiveMeeting. And one question that keeps...

Hello KN fans, just wanted to let you know that our team just created a new guide that is available for download on Microsoft Betaplace. The guide lists a set of simple steps that can assist you in validating a successful Knowledge Network server deployment...

We've been hearing this question a lot and here's the answer: If you already have access to SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 on the Microsoft Betaplace site, then you also have access to KN. If you do have this access, once you get to the main page...

For my first solo Blog entry it’s fitting that I use a title that gives nod to a Disney ride. This is John Hand from the KN team and for those who know me or view my shared keywords, you can see that asking me about anything Disney is a great way to get...