REBECKA ISAKSSON: Hi.
My name is Rebecka Isaksson
and I'm the Senior Product Marketing Manager
for knowledge in Microsoft 365.
I'm here today to talk to you
about some of the most exciting innovations in knowledge
for decades,
and how Microsoft 365 can help you access
instant relevant knowledge in context
right when you need it.
But first, let's take a look at the world around us
and how all the change that's happening every day
impacts us as people, as teams, and as organizations.
Change is nothing new.
We've always been impacted by cyclical,
market-driven changes, like new competitors,
skills gaps, disruption in supply chains, shrinking margins,
but the changes we're seeing now are different
and more disruptive.
Climate change, demographics changing, pandemics.
We're also seeing massive changes
driven by digital transformation, automation, AI,
and other technologies.
Change seems to be occurring more randomly
at seemingly higher frequencies and with more severe impact.
These changes are harder to predict and harder to mitigate.
So we need to find ways to become more resilient.
To build that resilience, we need to be flexible and agile.
That means empowering our people
to make more informed decisions and act faster.
Basically, to shift decision making
towards the edges of our organizations.
We will need new ways to connect people
with knowledge and experts,
and we need insights to understand the impact of volatility
on ourselves, on our work, and on our well-being.
Traditional knowledge solutions tend to focus on content.
Knowledge in Microsoft 365 is different
because it's truly people centric.
It puts people using the knowledge in the center
and it's not limited to content,
but it brings you valuable knowledge from conversations too.
The content centric approach to knowledge has drawbacks
as it keeps most content in silos.
Siloed information drives context switching
when you move between applications
and repositories to search,
and it requires you to know where to look for what
and pull that information to you.
With knowledge in Microsoft 365,
we are reinventing how knowledge is managed
from the ground up.
We're putting you in the center
and we offer you a personalized experience
by pushing the most relevant knowledge to you
in the flow of your work,
making it readily accessible
from within the apps you are already using every day.
And you will no longer have to tag content by yourself
to be able to find what you need.
Knowledge in Microsoft 365 uses advanced AI
to organize and connect content to people,
connect people to people, and to experts,
and find the answers you need, from anywhere,
right when you need it.
Let's start by taking a closer look at our knowledge star,
Project Cortex, and how it brings knowledge to you
when and where you need it in whichever app
you are working at the moment.
Outlook, SharePoint, or Teams.
Project Cortex has a lot of superpowers,
but the one we are going to focus on today
is its ability to know what you're looking for
before even you do.
It's important to note that Project Cortex
does not only access content stored in SharePoint,
but it has the capacity to also connect to other
non-Microsoft repositories.
It uses a Microsoft graph, and graph connectors,
to index content in the systems where it sits
and pulls out the most relevant pieces of information
from that content.
The advanced AI in Project Cortex
then reasons over all of that information
as well as the many signals that the graph collects
of who and how we collaborate across the organization.
It combines the essential information from the content
with those signals to create topics
and show us how different topics relate to one another.
For each topic that Project Cortex identifies,
it builds a topic page in SharePoint.
It creates a topic definition for us,
surfaces relevant content,
people who are knowledgeable about the topic,
as well as conversations happening about the topic
in Yammer communities.
Project Cortex's AI is great at extracting knowledge,
but it gets even better when people contribute with theirs.
So, when we allow the experts in our organization
to enhance topic pages by adding information,
pinning the best resources, all the top experts on a topic,
we get an augmented knowledge experience.
Finally, based on the topic page,
Project Cortex builds topic cards for us.
A topic card is similar to the people cards
we've been using in Microsoft 365 for years already
and they provide an executive summary of the topic page
starting with the definition of the topic, or a term,
at the very top of the card.
Then it lists the top resources
and people associated with the topic below.
And there is, of course, a scrolling bar
that allows you to move up and down the topic card.
Project Cortex surfaces those cards
in the apps you normally work in
like Word, Outlook, Teams, or Search.
Managing knowledge is no longer limited
to just managing content or documents.
Thanks to the new Yammer
combined with other innovations in Microsoft 365
and Project Cortex's unique ability
to surface conversations and questions and answers,
we now have a solution that harnesses the knowledge
that is usually lodged in our heads.
Over the last year, we've rebuilt Yammer from the ground up,
and in July this year, we announced general availability
of the new Yammer
across web, iOS, and android,
and with deep integrations
into Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook.
But let's start with what communities are
and why they matter.
The two most common questions we get
from customers right now,
when most of us can no longer meet in the office, are
how do we recreate
those serendipitous meetings and random encounters
that can be so creative and productive?
And the 2nd one,
how can I help my employees
stay engaged with co-workers and customers
and not start to feel alienated or isolated
from their communities?
Part of the answer is of course
in running effective, inclusive, and fun team meetings.
But we know that that is not the whole answer
because we know how important it is
for team spirit and employee morale
to connect with others who share the same interests
outside our immediate team or geographic location.
One of the most treasured aspects of communities
is that they offer a safety net of peers and experts
that we can reach out to and ask any question at any time.
A safe environment where no question
is considered a stupid question
and no question is left behind.
Communities are a great way to engage employees
outside of their immediate team
and help them connect to people
in other divisions or geographies
that share common interests.
By letting communities form and grow organically,
not limiting members to,
for example, a specific job or a specific organization,
important cross-pollination starts to happen
that breaks knowledge silos
and accelerate our time to knowledge.
A vibrant community can serve multiple purposes
from sharing important learnings and content
to conducting quick surveys
or ideate solutions to customer problems.
They're also a great place to celebrate success
and praise our peers and co-workers
for their work and ideas.
Building morale is key to fostering
that open, collaborative culture
that we want our people to embrace.
In a remote working environment,
communities can also be a great substitute
for those random encounters
and a conduit to expand your knowledge and network
as they are virtual and not limited to a specific building
or a specific floor.
By taking an active part in community conversations,
people make connections and establish friendships
across all levels.
The spirit of a sharing and collaborative culture
can be an effective onboarding mechanism as well.
We see a growing demand for social learning
as many organizations see the benefits
of formal and informal peer-to-peer learning channels.
Like any type of influence or scenario,
people tend to listen more
to the people they choose to follow
than the people they are required to follow.
This is my community story.
And the picture is from our internal readiness event,
TechReady 10, where I was given an award
for my contributions as a worldwide community lead.
I was an engagement manager in Microsoft Services
out of the Swedish office
when I was asked to startup a worldwide community
for the first time.
This was in 2008, and became the start of my journey
to a professional knowledge management practitioner.
There was a high demand for improvements
related to delivery excellence
in one of our technology areas
across our worldwide field teams.
We kicked off with some 100, 150 members,
and the community grew steadily to approximately 1,500
within a couple of years.
We had many knowledgeable and highly engaged [inaudible]
and members that worked with passion and dedication
to address common pain points, develop IP,
and crowdsource ideas that ended up becoming
company best practices.
We identified changes needed in business processes
to improve efficiencies in productivity on a global level,
and many of those are still in place
across the company today.
It was a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun.
And it helped me grow personally and professionally,
and the work we did helped many of our members grow as well.
I still get the occasional thank you note actually,
which is pretty incredible
since more than 10 years have past.
I truly believe in the power of communities
and the huge impact and the value they bring
for organizations and for the individuals within them.
My manager and mentor,
when I first started my career in knowledge,
always used to say "You don't know what you don't know."
And what makes me personally so excited about Project Cortex
is that this is the very essence
of its knowledge discovery capabilities.
But there are plenty of times
when we do know what we don't know
and that is where intelligent, integrated search comes in.
Let's take a look at some of the innovations
we're bringing to Microsoft Search this year.
Microsoft Search allows us
to index everything on the backend,
chats, files, answers,
and a lot more inside and beyond Microsoft 365,
thanks to the graph connectors.
This helps us identify
more than just information within content,
it helps us identify your areas of expertise
and suggests skills and knowledge
that you can add to your Microsoft 365 profile.
As you know, you can manually add topics and skills
to your Microsoft 365 profile already,
but now you will also get prompted by the system
to add topics or skills that you clearly know about
that you should perhaps add to your profile
to enable others to find you more easily
based on your expertise and knowledge.
Search used to be a lot harder than it needed to be.
To find answers and experts
you used to need to know where to look, how to ask,
and have all the time in the world.
Not anymore.
Just describe what you're looking for in plain language,
in any search box, and Microsoft Search
uses context and personalization
to help you cut straight to the answer.
Are you looking for a person
who knows about a specific topic?
Just ask "Who knows about", and their people card
will be at the top of the search results,
assuming that it is listed
on their Microsoft 365 profile of course.
But that's not all,
you can search for a lot more,
like acronyms or a specific office location,
as in the example shown here.
Again, the people card will come back
at the top of the result list
without you having to be a search query expert.
You just have to ask the question.
Before we round off this session,
I do want to say a few words about content services
that we have intentionally left out of this session.
Not because they are not relevant
to knowledge discovery, communities, and search,
but because of the extensive investments
and the innovations we've made to SharePoint,
managed metadata services, and of course, Project Cortex,
to truly reinvent and modernize
the way we work with content,
both structured and unstructured content,
in Microsoft 365 and beyond.
For those of you who have lived and worked
in the content management space for a long time,
you're very familiar with the importance of metadata
for building a great discovery experience.
With the AI capabilities we now have,
we can extract metadata and automate content tagging
in ways we were never able to do before.
Maintaining complex taxonomies
is no longer a prerequisite for findability,
but the taxonomies you already have in place
will not become obsolete, on the contrary,
they will work with the AI to enhance the experience
and make discovery even better.
To learn more about managed metadata services,
content understanding, and processing,
make sure you tune in
to some of our many Project Cortex sessions
available for online viewing.
The highlighted sessions
are the ones that go especially deep
into content services, taxonomy, and metadata.
Please take a moment to review our recommended next steps
and links to many valuable assets
to help you plan your journey to resilience today.
Thank you for spending this time with us
to learn more about knowledge in Microsoft 365
and how connecting people with knowledge and expertise
can help you build a more agile and resilient organization.
And make sure that the people in your organization
stay connected and feel included.
Don't hesitate to reach out to me,
connect with me on LinkedIn, or follow me on Twitter,
for even more exciting news
throughout the rest of this year and next.
Thank you.