Microsoft Academy Mobile - MOSS 2007 Powered, Community Driven Videocast/Podcast Service for the Enterprise - How We Did It
Overview
Social computing meets the field sales. This is how we can sum up Academy Mobile, a Microsoft internal social computing initiative aimed at creating a knowledge sharing environment through the use of videocasts and podcasts. With more than 25,000 people worldwide in roles related to sales and marketing, sharing best practices effectively and facilitating the flow of information efficiently among individuals are key success factors.
Background - Why We Did It
The Academy Mobile project is the latest addition to a series of online learning initiatives developed within the Enterprise Partner Group (EPG) at Microsoft. New and existing employees in field sales have a variety of opportunities to develop their skills by utilizing any of the internal offerings branded under the Academy moniker:
- Academy Live -- Length: 1 hour
Webcasts delivered by product groups using Microsoft Office LiveMeeting service. The focus is primarily on product positioning, business value, competitive strategy, and emerging technology. Live sessions include Q&A and whiteboarding and are recorded for on-demand playback.
- Academy Focus -- Length: 1 hour per day over 2-3 weeks
Peer led learning opportunities around architectural design, new product features, and competitive tactics. Content is by the community for the community and includes peer mentoring across activities.
- Academy Mobile (new!) -- Length: 5-10 minutes
A social computing experience with podcasts, RSS feeds, and community driven dialogue. It's like an MSN Soapbox or YouTube-like platform for the enterprise. Users can watch, listen, and share videocasts or podcasts with peers; in addition, subscribe to specific search queries, presenters, or tags. Users can also download their content onto their mobile devices such as Zune players and Windows Mobile phones.
Engaging the Community
The Microsoft sales force is a vibrant, geographically dispersed, and very busy community. The success of an initiative such as Academy Mobile largely depends on the desire of each individual in field sales to actively participate by frequently consuming content and at least occasionally creating some.
The Academy team has implemented to a variety of practices to ensure that the audience remains engaged. Some of the techniques include:
- Distribution of 6,000 micro-SD memory cards to the EPG field sales force so that their mobile devices are ready to load and play videocasts and podcasts. These memory cards were filled with a variety of video and audio content including instructions on how to create a podcast as well as voice recording software for Windows Mobile devices.
- Rewards program to incent the top contributors with an awards or points for redeeming prizes.
- Training sessions on how to create podcasts simply by using common and inexpensive Microsoft software and hardware.
- Phone-to-Podcast service that can record a podcast over the phone.
- Studio facility to record professional quality videocasts.
User Experience - What We Actually Did
Academy Mobile is an extranet site. Microsoft employees can access content without the need to VPN. Once authenticated, they are free to browse, search, download, or subscribe to videocasts and podcasts. Here's a screenshot of the Academy Mobile home page.
Social computing features include rating, commenting, and instant messaging via the integration of Office Communicator with SharePoint Server as pictured below.
To increase the discoverability of subject matter experts, video/podcasters can profile themselves with detailed personal attributes, and both their profiles and recordings can be rated by other users.
How We Did It
- Academy Mobile was built entirely on SharePoint Server 2007. The videocasts and podcasts are stored in a customized document library that has been tested to scale upwards of 10,000 podcasts. We will utilize additional document libraries as necessary in the future to accommodate growth.
- Primary SharePoint feature used was the Content Query web part, which allowed the aggregation of various videocasts and podcasts related to a person or tag.
- Other out-of-the-box SharePoint features that were leveraged include Search, Tagging (via a custom column), RSS, (E-mail) Alerts, File Downloading, Authentication (with dual-homed extranet support via Alternate Access Mapping), and Profile Management (with 1-way synchronization from Active Directory).
- Custom developed features were Rating, Commenting, and Download Tracking. We are considering donating these features with full source code to the Community Kit for SharePoint shared source project, but we have not made a decision yet.
- The hardware infrastructure consisted of 3 load balanced frontend web servers and 1 SQL Server 2005 cluster.
- The initial proof of concept was developed in just 3 weeks in December 2006 shortly after SharePoint Server 2007 RTM'd.
- Actual development started in March 2007 and finished in less than 4 months -- just in time for the launch at Microsoft worldwide sales meeting in July 2007.
- Overall project staffing included 2 Program Managers in Redmond and 10 people offshore in India, who collectively designed, customized, developed, tested, and deployed the solution.
The Team Leads
If you have any questions, please leave a comment under this blog entry.
