At Redmond, Wikipedia becomes Micropedia

REDMOND, Wash.--Aiming to build on the metaphor popularized by Wikipedia, a pair of Microsoft researchers have built Micropedia, an internal wiki cataloging every person and project within the company.

Microsoft researcher Steve Ickman said while the company's internal SharePoint site is great for some uses, there are some features that the Wikipedia engine has that are missing in Microsoft's product. One big thing is the engine's ability to archive. On the SharePoint site, typically only the current status of a project is shown.

"Once it's gone, it's gone," Ickman said of the SharePoint site. Micropedia, on the other hand, retains a sense of history, noting a past project and who worked on it, even if it involved people no longer at the company.

"I am a huge fan of wikis," he said. To populate the site, Microsoft Research's Tom Laird-McConnell mined the company's directory, creating a page for each employee as well as a page for each project that someone is or has been working on. The site allows anyone in the company to comment on a person or project and also displays in a separate pane any information found on the public Wikipedia.

Laird-McConnell said that by making the Wiki available company-wide, it would be easier for people in one part of Microsoft to know what those in other parts of the company are doing. Microsoft's current tools are largely organized by teams and are heavily permission-based.

"There's very little cross-collaboration," he said.

The Micropedia approach is similar conceptually to a tool used within Google where any employee can see what any colleague is working on.

For now, fewer than a dozen people, all in research, are using Micropedia, but its creators would like it to see it used throughout the company.

Microsoft has a wiki.

(Credit: Ina Fried / CNET Networks)

[ppgreat]

Isn't this how Post-It notes got started?

People within the company build something that others within the
company find useful, and so it goes.

Unless some bonehead manager says you can't use it due to a
policy that threatens their control.

Sorry SharePoint team, indeed!

[Penguinisto]

ROTFL!

Okay, seriously... whatever happened to the term Steve Ballmer coined called "eating one's own dog food"?

I'm very sure this little 'oversight' will be rectified fairly quickly... expect a lot of frustrated MSFT developers being forced to go back to SharePoint very, very soon now...

/P

[Lawrence Liu]

This is about doing research and improving our products

"Eating one's own dog food" (and we certainly do plenty of that at Microsoft) doesn't mean that we can't try someone else's once in awhile. The MSR folks and the SharePoint folks (yes, that would include me) have discussed the MicroPedia project from the get go. At Microsoft, people (especially researchers) are empowered to experiment with all kinds of technologies and ideas. Efforts like this (and our openness to them) ultimately help us improve our products.

Lawrence Liu
Senior Technical Product Manager for Social Computing
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

[Sumatra-Bosch]

Ballmer Will Have It Torn Our and the Manager Will 'Resign'

These people are face-biting fanatics. Ballmer makes his kids wear Zunes to school where they are heckled and tormented as pariahs. MSFT will implement those features ineptly and force their employees to suffer using them.

[Mel in Hi]

I agree

This obviously has been 'under the radar' and will quickly be stamped out. There is no reason that M$ will tolerate someone showing that their product isn't the logical choice for any given solution regardless of how bad it fits.

It reminds me of the checklists that they like to spread around showing that 'we have that feature too' even though the feature is bug ridden and doesn't really work. If someone else has something good, you leave it off the checklist or else 'rename it' so it sounds like it's a non-essential thing.

[zeevious]

Since When??

That phrase is attributed to Paul Maritz, who worked for Steve, afaik. Anyhow, I have been at MS many times, although not in the last few years. I can tell you that they didn't even use DevStudio back then, they certainly didn't use MFC for anything important, and in general had all sorts of inhouse solutions that they used over anything produced for the masses. They might have coined the phrase, but it wasn't reality, from anything I ever saw.

[bevo00]

Wikis

Wikis are proving to be great platforms for collaboration and brainstorming. I see the model as using wikis for all the informal project topics and to replace long chains of email messages with a structured repository. Once formalized, the wiki information is promoted to formal documentation and then published to Sharepoint.