Knowledge management (KM) is hard. This has been proven to me many times over the last 30 or so years I’ve been paying attention to the concepts. With the announcement of the abrupt retirement of Viva Topics as of February 22, 2025, I’ve been thinking about the history of KM solutions from Microsoft and where they have all gone.
It’s almost the normal course of events that we SharePointilists have to bend SharePoint’s capabilities to our whim to accomplish business requirements. This post is about one of these sort of bastardizations of the platform which allow us to get something important done. I’m writing it up because it’s what I do, but also to…
Yup, I’ll admit it: I’m confused. The launch of Microsoft Teams last week is what’s done it. First of all, from everything I’ve seen of the new tool, it’s really cool. I had some trouble getting my head around how to get it up and running in our Sympraxis Office 365 tenant, but now Julie…
By far the coolest thing I saw in the launch of Microsoft Teams yesterday was the Who-Bot. .@Microsoft Teams has a bot called WhoBot that acts as an expertise locator. That's YUGE! Classic KM problem – solved? Still need good data. pic.twitter.com/l0VmZDEBj1 — Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) November 2, 2016 It seems to address the…
I had the chance recently to have chat with TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland (@JoshBlandTA). This interview was a part of the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series. The series explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders. There’s plenty of great content there, including interviews with some of the speakers for the SharePoint Technology Conference – SPTechCon…
On Wednesday, July 20th, I attended the latest Boston KM Forum meeting at Bentley University. The theme was Fitting SharePoint to Knowledge Initiatives, which the content loosely followed and every presentation was valuable on some level. There were probably about 30-40 people in attendance (crowd estimation not being my forte). It seemed that the majority…
This coming July 20, I’ll be on the “Panel of Experts” at this event at Bentley University. We’ll be discussing Fitting SharePoint to Knowledge Initiatives, a topic near and dear to my own heart. SharePoint is really cool technology, but as I’m frequently saying, it’s just a tool which must be a part of a…
From Techweb via today’s Boston Globe’s Business Filter column: Middle managers are drowning A new report says that middle managers are swamped by useless information and spend about a two hours a day looking for the data they need. And often, once they obtain the data, half of it has no value to their jobs….
Back in the day, when I worked at Renaissance Solutions (an unfortunately defunct boutique management consulting firm), we talked about the ideas of Solution Calls and Puts (think options on the stock market). I didn’t ever get comfortable with the words that we used for the ideas, but basically it was a clearinghouse metaphor for…