Mint aims at rapid Microsoft-based collaboration with Knowledge Sharing Accelerator

Mint has created Knowledge Sharing Accelerator, a packaged solution that provides organisations with a mechanism for sharing and searching for knowledge in their business.

The solution enhances the natural functionality provided by Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server.

"Organisations globally are starting to embrace dedicated collaboration technologies at an increasingly rapid rate. Even organisations whose members used to create information in isolation a short while ago are starting to adopt and realise the benefits that collaboration technology provides," says Grant Hodgkinson, business development director at Mint.

"But enabling productivity from information often starts where collaboration finishes. With traditional technologies, many users are frustrated with their inability to distribute the knowledge they have created to the rest of the organisation once the collaboration process has been completed. And it is generally through this publication process that an entire organisation can stand to benefit from intellectual property created by a few members in the organisation."

Knowledge Sharing Accelerator has been designed to be deployed and operational in a short timeframe, including consulting time to match the organisation`s approach to knowledge storage to the technology, as well as the resultant configuration.

Collaboration is unstructured by nature, since it must allow for spontaneity and a creative thought process. Windows SharePoint Services is a great technology platform to allow this. The security definition and membership is also left up to the user who created that site in the first place and is not left to IT. In this way, users feel empowered and can freely work together.

SharePoint Portal Server allows the user to build a hierarchical storage structure for information and related materials, and it has a powerful search engine that enables both the content and metadata of designated content to be searched.

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The combination of these technologies is powerful, because they combine what was previously a disconnected set of functionality, where collaboration and storage were delivered separately.

"In our experience in working with these products over the past three years, there are still many functional components that will benefit users in being more productive with collaboration and knowledge storage. These are the elements of functionality that Knowledge Sharing Accelerator delivers," says Hodgkinson.

These functional components enable users to acquire a consolidated list of their tasks across all collaboration initiatives. With the standard implementation of the technology, users have to navigate to each collaboration space individually to get a list of their tasks. However, the Knowledge Sharing Accelerator consolidates these lists automatically.

The Knowledge Sharing Accelerator also makes it easier for users to link collaboration spaces to specific business units and then obtain a view of those associations. This is a capability that is not native to the platform. The standard functionality of the Microsoft platform requires that users "remember" where their collaboration spaces are stored.

Commenting on Knowledge Sharing Accelerator, Cyril Belikoff, Information Worker business group manager at Microsoft South Africa, says: "Mint`s approach to enabling customers to catalogue knowledge and search it afterwards places power in the hands of individual users. Addressing a very real business need every organisation has, it is testament to the capabilities of the technology."

The product allows users to easily publish a document from a collaboration space into the search-enabled knowledge store easily. This is not natively available in Microsoft technologies. During this process, the user is asked for more information about the document, which automatically helps categorise the document for searching purposes later. By going through this process the organisation can formally publish its knowledge for consumption by the rest of the organisation and make possible the distinction between collaboration, which is ad hoc, and structured knowledge storage.

Also, administrators are able to create new virtual navigation areas devoted to specific knowledge and expertise areas or document types. These virtual navigation areas are created by filtering metadata applied to documents. This allows documents to be stored once but represented multiple times automatically. This helps users find information quicker as they can navigate to the expertise area topic that interests them and get a filtered view of relevant information, without having to go through a complex searching process at the beginning.

"Although written using Microsoft SharePoint 2003 technology, the solution allows users to create metadata-driven catalogues, a function that is extremely prevalent in SharePoint 2007 and Mint will be fully supporting customers who plan to migrate to the new technology," Hodgkinson says. "Beyond facilitating an intelligent storage for knowledge, this system will also help organisations develop a more mature approach to knowledge storage and retrieval. It`s also a great way to look at how SharePoint can add value to any organisation. It has sometimes been difficult in the past."