Connecting Through Microsoft Office Research Services

For the corporate information worker, the nature of learning is fundamentally driven by connecting people that have questions to people that have answers. This is likely the most important learning process in any organization. One way to accelerate this is to provide mechanisms that expose subject matter experts in applications where office workers spend a great deal of time.

"Expert locators connect you to the person with the right answer." -- Jay Cross

The Microsoft Office Research Task pane coupled with MySmartChannels Office Research Services (ORS) provides a simple and effective means for displaying SmartPoints(tm) that call out domain experts whenever a search is performed. This service integration provides "expert locator" capabilities that factor in the social relationship between information items and the people that write them.