There was plenty of TechFest coverage last week, but we have a couple more bits to add to the mix.
Up now are several videos from last week, including highlights of a walk-around I did with Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer.
Click here for the Craig Mundie video.
There was a lot last week--from Micropedia, to the much-touted WorldWide Telescope to a new operating system called Singularity. To make it easier to find it all, check out this roundup of all our print and video coverage.
Also worth checking out is a video that colleague Kara Tsuboi did looking at some image-editing software that Microsoft had on display. While most software looks to edit things out of photos, Microsoft Research was showing off a program that adds things back in.
The idea is that these days, we all shoot a lot of pretty landscapes with little action going on. The program from Microsoft lets you throw in some stock images of cars and people and pets. Ideally, of course, you would be able to add-in your own images, but that will have to wait for an updated release.
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.
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