Microsoft Knowledge Network for Office 2007

I must have been asleep during May because I missed the announcement of this tool, which is an add-on to Office SharePoint 2007 and also includes a client component that allows an individual to control the information from their local Email folders and IM that they want to submit to SharePoint search so that it can be mined via SharePoint people search.  Microsoft certainly seem to have taken privacy concerns seriously and also used a lot of social networking smarts as this snippet from their blog shows:

When you run the KN client for the first time on your local machine, you can choose which Microsoft Office Outlook folders are included in your local analysis. (The KN client supports either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007.) After the KN client is done with its local analysis, it will recommend keywords and contacts for you to act on. The word “recommend” here is very important in that KN is only recommending keywords and contacts. It is only you who can decide what to accept, edit, or reject before your profile information is published to the server. You can also decide at this point whether or not you are willing to help your colleagues in an anonymous manner.

 

Once your profile information is published to the server, when your colleagues use SharePoint Server’s search facility to try to find someone with a particular area of expertise or particular contacts, the KN server responds to the query with personalized results that are displayed according to social distance and inferred relationship strengths, which were calculated by the innovative algorithms that we’ve developed.

 

So, KN can save you significant time when you’re trying to find the right people to connect with. It also allows you to choose the information you want to selectively share with your manager, your immediate workgroup, your colleagues, or your whole organization.

Definately looks like this is a blog that’s worth subscribing to.