The Knowledge Management Information Technology Group

KMIT has several unique charters within Microsoft:

• Drive creation of knowledge management and collaborative solutions on emerging Microsoft Technologies.
• Provide real-world feedback to the product teams while solving real business and user problems.

They discovered that Microsoft's 40,000 employees, like other knowledge workers in worldwide enterprises, were generally dissatisfied with existing capabilities in the areas of site creation, search, document collaboration and management, and maintainability.

Some groups were using Microsoft Office Server Extensions (OSE), for document publishing, discussion and subscription capabilities. Version tracking presented a challenge, however, as did site navigation. Within a group, different sub-groups wanted to organize documents differently. Consequently, the "one view fits all" folder hierarchy view was unsatisfactory. Also, these groups usually handled their calendars and contact management needs with applications separate from the document collaboration space.

Other groups created their own custom Web sites with custom applications. This provided them with great control over the look, feel, and navigation features. However, these solutions were time consuming to build, hard to maintain, and impossible to share with other groups. The resources dedicated to building and maintaining these solutions were not available for Microsoft's primary mission, building and providing innovative software and solutions.