With all the talk about Web 2.0, Social Computing and now the economic crisis, it is time to turn back to productivity and knowledge management.

If you are an employee and as part of your job you start researching the Internet or Intranet for resources, you eventually find something and add it to your browser favourites. That is great for you but there are probably other people in your organization that could benefit from your research so you do one of 3 things:

1. Keep the link to yourself, why share?
2. Email everyone the link with a short synopsis as to why you think they may be interested in it
3. Share the link using some social tagging solution

We all know what is wrong with the first two options. There are several good public solutions for #3 like Del.icio.us but what if this research that you performed as part of your job contributes to the intellectual property of your organization? You would want to keep this information within the enterprise. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has provided this capability since it was released in 2006 through the My Links feature (in fact Portal Server 2003 even had this capability).

Figure 1: SharePoint My Links feature

The only real weakness in this solution is the lack of multiple tagging or tying the grouping to enterprise taxonomy. Lets hope this is improved in the next version, otherwise I see great potential for swapping this out for a 3^rd party solution.

Figure 2: Tagging a link using the Grouping feature

I have posted a solution previously to allow users to add links while they are browsing non SharePoint sites from a browser favourite link here http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=62

Back to Knowledge Management... Combining the My Links that an expert has gathered and categorised along with his user profile, other users are more likely to discover these resources when they are searching for a particular topic.

Figure 3: User Profile fields to assist in KM

You could either have a SharePoint site per specialist subject area and use search results web parts (Core Results and People results parts) to exposes the people and information relevant to the topic, or a tab in the search centre for KM with customized web parts.

Back to productivity... Helping people find relevant information and authoritative resources quickly will increase productivity.

I can see this scenario being built in one of my demo images...

Just don't try and use one of those analysts ROI statements on the cost of time spent searching for information to justify a new purchase of anything, this post is intended for organizations that already own SharePoint Server but are not getting the full potential of its capability to deliver on productivity and KM.