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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 we achieved. As a result the next generation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) will reap the benefits. So if you are a KN fan rest assured that your passion for Social Networking has had an impact on future releases of MOSS. It has been a pleasure and honor to work with and for you on this Technical Preview and we look forward to your continued support in the next release of the Microsoft Office System. To check on the progress of the future of MOSS, visit our SharePoint webpage http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.mspx. Thanks again for all of your support.
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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 is our first build that we feel is stable enough to be the final code. Pending your feedback and assuming that this code will be stable we will rerelease this code as the Release To Web (RTW) version. If we get significant feedback that there are issues with this build we will fix those and then release it again as RC1. But we feel pretty confident that this is the one. So enjoy!
This release features the following enhancements:
· Back-off functionality to improve your experience when you are performing activities on your machine
· Various performance enhancements on both the client and server
· Improved keyword quality and generation
· An inner-circle web part that highlights people closest to you and are most likely to assist with your query
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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 only is it fixed, but you can now tell all of your friends to go and get it. It’s free, and you can now get access to the download page WITHOUT, yes that right WITHOUT needing to request a password. We created a page that explains the system requirements and the fact that KN is NOT supported by Microsoft. Once you click yes to “I Accept” on that page you will be directed to the download site where you can download both the client and server software. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are in the same package. Make sure that you install the version that is right for your environment. So please accept my sincerest apology for any confusion or inconvenience that this delay has caused and enjoy using KN. Check it out at https://connect.microsoft.com/knbeta
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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.microsoft.com/knbeta) and follow the Downloads link on the left hand side to access the software package and documentation. This release features the following enhancements:
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Back-off functionality to improve the user experience when they are performing activities on their machines.
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Various performance enhancements on both the client and server.
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Improved keyword quality and generation.
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An inner circle web parts that highlights people closest to you and who are most likely to assist with your query.
We hope you are as excited and enthusiastic about KN as we are. Enjoy!
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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 preview, which is a way for us (Microsoft) to provide a long-lead time to our customers to look at future technologies that Microsoft is working on. The code is just at the stage where we are ready to make it available to the public as a "release candidate" or RC. The function of the RC is that it serves as the almost ready for primetime release and many times actually becomes the RTM (released to manufacturing or retail version) or in our case the RTW (released to web) version. Those of you not familiar with KN it has been in our information worker incubator group for more than three years, it is home-grown technology designed to allow a company to expose and leverage their combined intellectual assets and social capital. Essentially who knows what and who knows whom (both internal and external to an organization). Our original plan was to release KN as an add-on to Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and provide it for no additional cost to customers who had any valid client license for SharePoint. The longer term goal is to incorporate the technology into a future release of SharePoint. So what has changed? Only this, the support model, so instead of releasing KN as a v1 supported product we made the difficult decision that at this time it makes better sense to release it as an unsupported Technical Preview. Why? Because KN in its current form is English only, it uses a separate client install and has a separate indexer. By making it an unsupported Technical Preview we give freedom to the SharePoint team to rewrite how these features are architected for future releases without the concern of breaking something that we know we need to change and without the constraint of supporting the add-on version for 10 years. Having said that we are still very enthusiastic about KN and where the technology can go and grow in the future. We openly encourage customers who are willing to evaluate emerging technologies to go ahead and deploy it and try it out and give us their feedback, feedback that will be used to shape the future of Knowledge Network. So expect to hear an announcement in the next week or two about how to get your hands on the technology and to check it out in your own environment.
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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 head with a carefully thrown foam football.
Let me back up for a second. Catapult Systems is a Microsoft Gold Partner headquartered in Austin, TX. We have a sister company, Inquisite, that produces the enterprise human insight software of the same name. Bryan Hood, “Hoody” to his friends, works for Inquisite. I am an IW Practice Director and SharePoint MVP for Catapult Systems, that means that I spend all of my time eating, drinking, evangelizing and delivering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). A large part of my role is working with clients to understand the business problems they face and how to use technology to support the business solution. The problem we encounter in most organizations is “finding information.” In most organizations this means documents. The real challenge our clients face however, is that so little of their truly valuable information is stored in documents. For example, consider the bigger long term financial loss to a company, a file share of old proposals or the departure of a key sales person (and all of his/her contacts) or the “go-to" guy the “MVP” who leaves because he is overwhelmed in his job?
So what does Hoody have to do with this? Hoody is that sales guy, he sets the bar, he’s “the man!” Hoody’s contacts make him an MVP. In fact every one of our sales folks is an MVP in their own way because of their contacts and the relationships they have established with their accounts. Hoody and I are so busy that we don’t get to talk much, much less throw a football around but since we use KN we can share the intellectual capital that we both hold sacred.
There are three key scenarios where KN drives our business:
Expertise location – I work with a very talented team that is distributed across all of our offices. Most everyone at Catapult knows that I am the “SharePoint Guy.” What most don’t know is who the SharePoint team is, who they can call in Dallas for SharePoint help. The issue is not finding THE expert, but finding the “very knowledgeable,” those individuals who have the knowledge and ability (and bandwidth) to solve a problem or answer a question. Most questions don’t require the expert. Sometimes you are looking for the “composite talent”…the person who is good at “this AND that,” KN can provide that insight.
Finding the Rights – Finding Mr. or Ms. Right is about more that finding the right person. Often it is about understanding how that person interacts with the organization and their social distance from me (or the target of my search). The power of people search is not in finding a list of names, but being able to evaluate the list based on factors like social distance, colleagues in common, title, department, etc. The right person is often a collection of experiences and connections that is illusive and hard to quantify, but I know it when I see it.
External Contact Location – I need to know “who in my company knows someone in another company.” I need the personal connection that will make the difference, whether I am looking for help or looking to close a deal. Recently I began working on a migration solution for MOSS and needed to contact a technical resource inside Metalogix. Using KN I was able to find a Catapult employee who had the contact I was looking for in Metalogix. (It turns out the guy sits two cubes away from me!)
I communicate daily with extremely talented individuals both inside and outside our firewall. The quantity and quality of those communications are captured in my e-mail correspondence. KN unlocks this island of information stored in Outlook and makes it available to my team and my coworkers, with the security required by the sales folks like Hoody. I need the information that my colleagues have locked in their heads and address books. I thirst for more information, quality information, about the people in my company. I may have access to a lot of information but I am a true sufferer of “Knowledge Underload.” But with KN making the connection to friends and colleagues is as easy as making that pass to Hoody with the football.
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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.
This update comes as a response to customer feedback. Across the board, people are excited about KN, but they’ve also stressed that they’d like to see KN integrated into the core Office Client and Server products rather than released as an add-on. After carefully considering the trade-offs, we think that’s the right way to go. The release next year will be a preview of capabilities we’ll be working to incorporate into Office in the future.
Technical Previews are best used to pilot new technologies and solicit feedback, and that’s exactly what we want to do. We hope that that customers who use the release in this way will not only gain valuable insight into how the technology can be implemented more broadly, but will also provide us with input that will be invaluable in integrating these features into future releases of the Office System. Stay tuned for more.
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We’ve been receiving questions about system requirements for KN. Important requirements include:
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 mailbox is required for users running analysis. KN client analysis will not work against any other email systems other than Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or 2007.
- Knowledge Network analysis will run successfully only on English email content.
See below for the more complete software and hardware requirements for KN on the client and server ends:
Software Requirements
Client:
- Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
- .Net Framework 2.0
- Microsoft Office 2003 or Office 2007
- Outlook email client from Office 2003 of Office 2007
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7
- Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 mailbox required for users running analysis
- Knowledge Network analysis will run successfully only on English email content
- Either Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Microsoft Office Communicator are required to import Instant Messaging contacts
Server:
- 32 bit Windows 2003 Enterprise Server SP1 with Office Server 12 or 64 bit (X64) Windows 2003 Enterprise Server SP1 with 64 bit Office Server 12
- IIS 6.0 installed on the target server
- .Net 2.0 and ASP.Net 2.0
- Microsoft Office Server 2007 must be installed according to the appropriate server type (i.e. front-end or an application server)
- Each of the computers must be using the NTFS file system
- Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005
Minimum Hardware Requirements
KN Client:
- 1 GHZ Processor (minimum)
- 512 MB of RAM
- 1 GB free space (2GB recommended)
Server:
- Disk Space: 18 GB Data Space (30 GB Data space preferred)
- Single box installation
- CPU (X86 or X64): 2.5 GHZ
- Memory: 4 GB recommended
- Farm Deployment
- Web server (CPU (X86 or X64): 2.5 GHZ, 2 GB RAM
- App server (CPU (X86 or X64): 2.5 GHZ, 4 GB RAM
- SQL (CPU (X86 or X64): Dual proc 2.5 GHZ; 4 GB RAM
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We've been getting a number of inquiries about the best way to contact us to get Knowledge Network, so we have updated that information here. We have now opened availability of the Knowledge Network Technical Refresh (KN TR) for selected organizations on our new Microsoft Connect site. Connect only allows email addresses that have an associated Passport account or a Windows Live ID to register. 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 email us at knfeedbk at Microsoft.com and we’ll get back to you with a set of questions. Once we evaluate your responses we’ll let you know next steps. Recall also that KN requires that you run Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, so please only request KN TR access if you are also running SharePoint Server 2007.
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We've been talking to many customers lately about their experiences with KN. You can hear a few present their highlights at the upcoming KMWorld and ECMWest conferences. We also have heard from top strategists who work with large organizations around the world. Here is what one of our colleagues in the field stated today about how KN can help manufacturing customers:
"Automotive companies have invested heavily in more responsive lean manufacturing processes, just-in-time inventory systems, synchronized design and development processes. Today, a significant percentage of the automobile is developed and manufactured by OEM supplier networks. Consequently, the cost and quality of a vehicle are a function of the productivity of a network of firms working in collaboration. Thus, identifying and accessing expertise within the organization and uncovering connections across the supply chain are critical elements of competitive advantage. KN can provide these just-in-time expertise location capabilities to allow customers to find, use and internally share their knowledge-based networks to achieve sustainable competitive advantage."
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We are pleased to announce the availability of the Knowledge Network 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. Here is quick rundown of the key areas that been enhanced in this release.
KN Client
1. Removed requirement of SP1 having to be installed on Active Directory servers.
2. Improved performance of KN Client. More e-mail processed in less time.
3. Improved analysis keyword quality.
4. Reduced impact of analysis on machine performance.
5. Analysis suspends when machine moves to battery power.
6. Added Outlook toolbar add-in to initiate People Search.
7. Added ability to import an existing profile on the server into a newly installed client.
KN Server
1. Added ability to identify KN members in search results.
2. Improved performance of External People and Find People Who Know This Person searches.
Administration
1. Added STSADM commands for several administrative tasks.
2. Added performance counters to aid in monitoring system health.
3. Added ability to disable the External Contacts feature on both the KN Client and Server.
4. Added ability to change default settings for Anonymous Brokering.
5. Added Group Policy ADM file to configure KN client settings.
Please be sure to refer to the deployment guides for both the server and client when installing Knowledge Network software which are available on Microsoft Betaplace. This release will run only on MOSS 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (MOSS B2TR). Therefore, if you plan to upgrade from an existing MOSS B2TR, instead of the recommended clean MOSS install, please make sure you follow the recommended steps in the server deployment guide which were also highlighted in the previous KN blog entry.
If you do not have access to Microsoft Betaplace we will provide more information soon about the timing and availability of KN bit for broader download.
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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 Beta Technical Refresh (KN TR), which should be available from Microsoft Betaplace around the middle of next week, it is important to keep in mind that there is NO straight upgrade path from Knowledge Network (KN) Beta to Knowledge Network Beta Technical Refresh (KN TR). Therefore, we strongly encourage our customers to perform a clean installation of MOSS Beta 2 Technical Refresh (MOSS B2TR) and then install Knowledge Network Beta Technical Refresh on top.
However, if you choose to upgrade your MOSS Beta 2 to MOSS B2TR, then it is important to uninstall KN server components from MOSS Beta environment before upgrading to MOSS B2TR. You can then follow the recommended steps below as a best practice to achieve a smooth transition from KN Beta to KN Beta TR. In addition, the following points should be kept in mind as you work through upgrade process:
· Your users’ Beta profile data will not be retained in the process of upgrading KN. The key motivation for not providing a workaround to retain the Beta profile data is due to the investments we made in the profile generation algorithms in the TR version and therefore we would like all users to generate new profiles using the new KN TR client and upload those instead of using the Beta profiles as a baseline.
· As you ramp up your MOSS/KN upgrade planning and schedule, it is important to keep in mind that MOSS B2TR is not backward compatible with KN Beta server. This means that once you migrate your MOSS Beta environment to MOSS B2TR, the KN Beta server will not run in that environment and hence your KN users will not have to access to a working KN version until KN TR is deployed. Conversely, the KN TR requires MOSS B2TR and hence will not run on MOSS Beta.
With the above points/caveats in mind, here is the step-wise process for deploying KN TR in an upgraded MOSS B2TR scenario. The steps below refer to sections of the KN Deployment Guide which is currently on Betaplace. An updated KN Deployment Guide will be packaged with the KN TR on Betaplace.
1. Back up your exclusion lists by copying them manually from the KN admin UI page. This step is optional.
2. Uninstall KN server components using the steps described in the Uninstall Knowledge Network section (of the KN Deployment Guide)
3. Upgrade your MOSS environment to MOSS B2TR and verify it is working properly.
4. Install KN Server Beta TR by following the steps outlined in the Knowledge Network installation section
5. Activate the following features (for specific details, see the Advanced Configuration section of this document).
a. Knowledge Network Administration Feature
b. Knowledge Network SQM Feature
c. Knowledge Network Search Center Feature
d. Knowledge Network Profile Center Feature.
6. Run the following SQL statement on the SSP database: “Update MIPSCheduledJob set NextDueTime = getutcdate()where [Assembly] like 'Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialNetwork%'
7. Go to the SharePoint Services Administration Home Page for the Shared Service Provider and click the Data Management link in the Knowledge Network section. Rename the Knowledge Network database to a new name other than the defaulted name and click OK. This will create a new database with a schema that is compatible with the KN Beta TR. Be sure that the database is successfully created by periodically refreshing the page and checking the status. If the status remains locked in the “Initializing Database Creation then you will need to reset the MOSS timer service by running “net stop sptimerv3” followed by “net start sptimerv3”
8. Go to the Timer Jobs page on the Knowledge Network admin page. Click on each job and change its schedule type to Full.
9. Copy the exclusion lists manually into KN via a simple copy/paste in the KN admin UI page for exclusions lists (or using the newly available “stsadm –o ImportExclusionList” command). Again this step is optional.
10. Uninstall KN Beta client
11. Install KN Beta TR client by following the steps outlined in the Knowledge Network Client Deployment Guide
For the sake of completeness, here are the steps that will allow you to uninstall Knowledge Network from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which restores Microsoft Office Server back to the state it was in prior to the Knowledge Network installation.
12. Deactivate the following features (for specific details, see the Advanced Configuration section of this document).
a. Knowledge Network SQM Feature
b. Knowledge Network Administration Feature
c. Knowledge Network Search Center Feature on every Search Center where it’s currently activated
d. Knowledge Network Profile Center Feature on every Personal Site provider where it’s currently activated.
13. Go to the Services Server page in Central Administration and stop all the Knowledge Network services on the server including Knowledge Network Application Service as well as the Knowledge Network Search Service if this Server is the intended as an application Server
14. Run the following SQL statement against your SSP database: “update MIPSCheduledJob set NextDueTime = DateAdd(year,100,getutcdate()) where [Assembly] like 'Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialNetwork%' You will need to do this step only once per SSP if you have installed Knowledge Network on more than one SSP.
15. Click the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard shortcut.
a. Click Next.
b. Select Disconnect from this server farm.
c. Click Next, and then complete the steps of the wizard.
· In Windows Control Panel, click Add or Remove Programs, and then uninstall Knowledge Network Server.
· Click the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard shortcut
a. Click Next.
b. Select Join an existing farm.
c. Connect to the existing farm and specify the appropriate parameters.
d. When you get to the Central Administration creation screen, be sure to use the same port number as the one you used prior to uninstalling.
· In the Central Administration Services page on this computer, start the Windows SharePoint Web Application Service.
· Start Office SharePoint Server Search Service.
· Perform steps 2 through 6 on every machine in the farm.
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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.
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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. Below he shares some of the good, the bad and the ugly from his KN evaluation.
The KN team invited me to write a guest entry describing my experience with KN - here it is.
I'm an end user, but I like to think I'm "enlightened" in some respect. With a bit of a background in social network analysis, I could see immediately what KN is trying to do and how it can be useful. And as a new MS employee, it had the potential to help me out a lot in on-boarding, too.
KN digs into the knowledge that people have but don't advertise. How often have you seen an employee skill index? Not very often, if you're like me. Many times in my career I have been surprised to discover, after some number of months or years of working with someone, that she has deep expertise in some field that we're not working with at the moment. Some examples from my previous job include a server programmer with a doctorate in numerical analysis, a system administrator with a degree in ecology, and a distributed systems expert who had done groundbreaking work on modeling the migrations of bighorn sheep. None of these may have seemed especially relevant to what they were doing at the time -- except of course in the way that education helps with general cognitive ability. However, what they didn’t know was that the same company we all worked for, in the next building, had an artificial ecology project underway that could take full advantage of every one of their skills, either full time or in consulting and advising roles.
This just highlights the fact that we hardly know what we know at all. Knowledge in modern organizations isn't just 80% undocumented, it's 95% invisible. Knowledge Network painlessly teases that hidden material into the light, over time, and I am looking forward to a better future when everyone in the group, division, and company is working to their greatest advantage as a result.
It's not without some frustrations... the client does have to sit there in your system tray and occasionally sift through your inbox. That's not free, and because it's partially a standalone client you have to install, it's a barrier convincing people to install the thing. The KN client could spit bars of gold out the USB port and you'd still have to do some selling to get it installed everywhere, and that's an issue because like the Internet the KN system is more valuable the more people who use it. I was on the Internet in 1992 and it was nothing to jump up and down about at the time; the only tangible difference between then and now is a little trim of good software and a huge increase in the number of people using it.
Not enough people in my group are running KN, and that limits the effectiveness of advertising my keywords as well as who I can find by KN search to ask about specific topics important probably only to the Windows Server Division. Maybe some of the problem, too, is that the keywords seem, at times, a bit generic, and the weighting feels... a little superficial? My profile has "C#", 3 stars. Does that mean I can (or am willing to) answer general questions about the language? Or does it mean I am able to untangle tricky asynchronous programming bugs? I don't know how to improve it, but I think stars don’t offer the final answer on keyword tagging.
I'd like to see KN do more of its work server-side, though I can see several reasons why the KN team didn't go that route. And one of these days the KN client will be as omnipresent, natural, and inevitable as virus scanners... only less intrusive and instead of preventing pain, the clients will be delivering gifts. At least, until the KN idea is recognized as a truly important part of innovating and doing business efficiently, and then it'll be a hygiene issue and nobody will dream of doing without it.
In the meantime, as soon as your organization has access to the software you may want to get a jump on it and install the client on your own.
Patrick
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