Several weeks ago, I got an email from a co-worker that stumbled on this blog trying to get a feel for what other Knowledge Managers might be doing at Microsoft. I hadn’t updated this blog in maybe a year or so, but it was the only way that the co-worker...

A correction: Thanks to a great discussion with a co-worker (Sacha Arozarena Valladares - http://blogs.msdn.com/sacha/ ) he told me that my analogy doesn’t work well re: the mortgage industry. He’s right. The issue with my analogy is that the wisdom of...

I checked out this book from our work library. I really hope that it gives an idea how to actually measure anything. To make sure it was really worth my time, I looked up a reader review I found on the web . This made me slightly concerned, although if...

We are very concerned about the amount of time our engineers spend blogging. In our business, we think it's absolutely the right thing to do - get engineers to talk to customers directly about the products they support. They can use blogs to talk about...

We're always looking at new ways to help customers. One of the ways that have come up recently is through automated answering services. These are systems that ask you to type in your question, and then based on certain trained vocabulary, the system presents...

Sorry for the lack of content. I have been on vacation and have some additional vacation this week and next. You won't see another post from me until August 7. Hunter

Microsoft is arguably at the forefront of corporate-sponsored blogging. We have thousands of blogs, ranging from some of our support-based blogs, to blogs managed by marketing groups, to blogs managed by developers. With such a wide breadth of authors...

KB articles are a system of "we think the product or process will break in this way" bodies of work that try to anticipate the questions you are going to ask when you need support. The problem with this system is that companies do a really poor job of...

When I talk to other companies about knowledge management, I realize that Microsoft has a fairly unique problem - we really care about providing information in a language you can understand. This is a really neat problem to have though, since as a corporation...

That's an interesting premise considering I'm doing precisely that on this blog, isn't it? It's true though - blogging isn't that great a place to share knowledge. I suppose if you live in the old world of printed books and libraries, maybe blogging isn...

I was looking around at Apple’s KB, and noticed that they’ve recently redone their kb numbering scheme from the old 6 digit system to a new two digit identifier + new article number. I was wondering what their thinking was behind that. They’re still in...

When people podcast today, they rarely think about some of the issues that this new medium brings. When I think of podcasting (or blogcasting if you're trying to be different) I think of the following issues that you too should consider. Discoverability...

Twitter is dumb Twittering as a means to communicate provides very little value to those actually reading the content that someone can twitter. I have difficulty understanding how someone can convey an interesting thing that I'd want to consume via this...

My name is Hunter Donald. I'm a Program Manager spending my days worrying about how to better leverage knowledge within our support organization. The purpose of this blog is to expose areas of KM that I find interesting, show how Microsoft is thinking...