 My name is DigiVigil and I've been drinking the Kool-Aid for more years and I care to discuss at least here This will be a Microsoft centric talk If that scares anyone, that's a warning right there How many of you are working in a predominantly Windows-based environment? Wow, and we're all at DEF CON that's awesome. I don't feel alone anymore I was going to sign up for some sort of anonymous group 12-step program hasn't happened yet Okay, so this talk is going to give a brief introduction of SharePoint I don't know if that's going to be valuable for most of the attendees here if they're familiar with it and then I'll go into the SharePoint Knowledge Network after that Moss 2007 which stands for Microsoft Office SharePoint server, but that's pretty long So with mosses come a vernacular that we use is a development platform a development framework It is a portal framework, and it's also a collaboration suit Microsoft targets this in two completely different ways They sell it to corporations as an out-of-the-box portal solution And they sell it to developers as a framework that they can build portal solutions on In most cases companies will buy it and deploy it and they will work up to a certain point and they will discover that hey We can't how do we do this and that's where consultants come in and say we can help you do that for a certain amount of money And then they go back to Microsoft. Why do you said he could do everything? It can you just need help That's the service provider part of the Microsoft ecology There are two versions one is free and has been wrapped with Windows since 2003 and certainly in 2008 It's Windows SharePoint services It includes most of the collaboration features, but none of the portal features the API if you're targeting building something for SharePoint and You want it to be free then there's a lot of the API you can't use because it's specific to the portal version The portal version is licensed and it's fairly expensive. I'm not sure what the What the newest prices, but I remember 50k being bandied about for a single license I'm not certain about that price So what does SharePoint do? It does document management It in several places that I've been is replaced documentum. It's certainly not at documentum's levels at any Conceivable point, but it does document management. It replaces file shares things like that It has news groups discussion groups. It can do simple lists. It's You can create tables you can tell in which columns it has but you cannot reference one table from another table It has no integrity on it, and it certainly cannot scale very well to large amounts of data It can do content management task management. It has a very simple wiki functionality that you can use it has an ability to build an XML schema so you can show Data from other sources through SharePoint by defining the schema in XML. It's interesting Excel services actually allows you to have online hosted excel sheets that people can interact with and they don't require excel on the local box to use it All of these solutions Have fairly good functionality, but there are other solutions out there for each one of them that does a lot better At each one of them so SharePoint covers a lot of ground, but none of it very deeply So why do people buy it? It's a consistent portal solution that you can use for all parts of the enterprise if you have the money for it and the developers to help you do that and It's Once it's meant as a one-stop shop Why should we care about SharePoint? More and more companies will be adopting SharePoint and a lot of them already have Microsoft has been investing very heavily in promoting SharePoint and They are Spending an awful lot of efforts evangelizing it as a solution to their developers We will see SharePoint deployed in more and more Microsoft centric shops And it replaces a lot of Java based frameworks at least in what I've seen To be honest, I don't know exactly why it is so successfully Been deployed Microsoft has an awesome sales machine. That's all I can say A lot of the people who have adopted it Once they've gone through with all of it. They're like, well, it's not really that good and what we had worked pretty well But it's out there We did that So the most knowledge network the title of this talk Was an extension to SharePoint 2007 in the beta edition and it came out at least in an RC1 No RC0 For some reason that was never publicly disclosed at least not that I saw Microsoft never released a full production version of the most of the most knowledge network They had fairly large Customers that had implemented the parts of it that were released, but for some reason It never fully went and Some of you might know that SharePoint 2010 is right around the corner Which means three to six months in Microsoft Time the beta has no whatever is pre beta has been released to certain vendors and certain providers They are not allowed to talk about what's in it at this moment But it's relatively likely that the next version of SharePoint will contain functionality taken straight from the knowledge network and implemented Newer versions of Windows Server and the Microsoft operating system will probably also contain fragments of what the knowledge network had in it For a while they talked about having this functionality in Windows 7 and I have not seen that in the Releases that they've had so far Microsoft decided to create the knowledge network based on The fact that most information in companies is undocumented and it's difficult for the organization to know who has the knowledge within and Who has the specific knowledge that is needed so that people can easily collaborate and connect? The data sources that the knowledge network we use to harvest information from includes email team sites as an artifact of SharePoint Websites I am contacts contact lists profiles and SharePoint my sites is not a SharePoint artifact active directory relationships managers divisions things like that distribution lists and Speculations were for extending it into I am traffic and integration with the phone system It uses the source of data to calculate social distance between Different parts different employees basically and map out the knowledge that it can find to all of these sources that they have It's about connecting people. It's about it's Microsoft first foray into trying to create an Automatic social networking that doesn't require each user to connect to each other in a manual way But actually will forge these relationship out of the data that he can analyze and find It is meant to help the users to collaborate and discover Yeah It's it's a client Server product, but it has a component called the seeker some of the client components will actually run inside of outlook Inside of your email client On your desktop and it will constantly be feeding information back to the server Which will store it and the seeker will index it The seeker will aggregate profiles and try to discover who knows who who knows what when why and so forth The relationship data sources or input for the knowledge network correlation store, which is the seeker Which is surfaced through the browser you can actually Go through the API for this and develop your own custom solutions based on the data that's stored in the correlation store for those of you familiar with an old Microsoft Product called site server, which they came out and saw server commerce edition and has had a couple of others There's actually parts of that that was part of the knowledge network So it's over three commerce edition had something called a profile which was meant to target Customers with data that would be useful for them Thank you So Amazon has this in a great deal today You bought something and they can see that based on what other people have bought you probably interested in buying these six other items And sometimes I can go horribly wrong, but the predicting algorithm there Microsoft had a similar thing going in Commerce server and now in the knowledge network It is not meant to really Tell you who is an expert in organization because that's already fairly well known and established ideas to Establish secondary and tertiary sources of information or Searched information that you did not know that the company had this is for a high level for managers things like that Or if you're stuck behind a deadline and you're working late and the guy who's the head of it Is not available for what a reason is that golfing you might find other people who could help you The wonderful quote that I found somewhere was to organically discover expertise to enable an organization to make better choices quicker And that's obviously a marketing involvement somewhere in there because no engineer come up with that I Found this whole thing from when I first learned about it to be frightening They mean That they can find sources that they can It's an attempt to Discover who knows what so if you have x documents No, no, no based on their email based on their I am based on the documents that are stored that they have tagged In SharePoint or other places where you can find it So it's a data mining process to try to discover What do you know and what your friends know and in a network sense what everybody knows That made sense thing What popped into my mind when I started reading about and first heard about it was this total information awareness that we heard about for a While from the government I Think I read about two implementations of the government tried to have of it one got scrapped what happened to the other one I don't know because I'm certainly not privy to that kind of information except through various Conspiracy theory websites, which I never visit of course The idea of total information awareness was to tie together all the separate pieces of data that the government might Have of you and form a holistic profile to try to figure out who was going to do bad things Some people Seem to protest that this was taking place and they raised quite a lot of who huh the interesting thing for me It's not really if the government succeed in creating that program or not because I'll never know But I'm interested in knowing What companies are doing because companies certainly have the same interest and I can be Google that can be Amazon I can be Facebook or MySpace They are interested in harvesting all the information they can find about You and then try to build the model of what they can sell you or Sell your information to other people if they can aggregate it in a proper manner Now That said I tried to include a couple of slides here now on Microsoft's attempt to mitigate the worries that I tried to outline They thought that there could be customers that had previously concerns involving The Knowledge Network That's pretty impressive. I can't imagine what the you lies like for this product And they aimed to address these concerns by striking the right balance among utilities simplicity and privacy this would have to be sold so that The manager who bought it understands the return on investment and the return of investment comes from being able to mine As much data as possible if they actually make it so that people can easily turn off what information is being mined There is no ROI that they can really talk about here So I'm very curious once this the bits for 2010 comes out if they do indeed include this how much of the Privacy aspects that they promoted have actually been Implemented they have five levels of privacy that they didn't fight in the product That goes from just me my manager my colleagues my work group everyone Chances are this will be hidden in some very obscure configuration in your profile somewhere and finding it will be a Challenge and I'm pretty sure that the company will not do its best to tell you about it if you think about What happens over? The network a lot of people send personal emails at work this could go into it as well I think you could be used a lot to identify who's spending time doing what as well and help them make rational decisions for Saving money in the personnel department so knowledge network can be seen as a technology preview and It was pulled and they never explained why it was pulled and they had a lot of big customers who were very interested in it it is indicated that it will be included in the new versions and And since they have this product and it's thank you, and it's pretty much done I'm wondering if they don't have a much better version of it running behind Bing and To mind all of the data that they're collecting through hot mail. No, sorry light. No, sorry being male. Is it being male now? I don't know what it is anymore and The bigger question that I have from a much more secretive organization than Microsoft is what the hell is Google running behind the scenes on All the data and all the ad tracking that they have That was my talk. I Have five minutes left if there are any questions Parts of it will definitely be included in 2010. How deep it goes. I don't know and if I knew I couldn't talk about Legally Yes, not that I'm aware of no I I've not seen any there are no components of it. That should be a part of That Sorry Yeah, it could be how they is So they like to talk Yeah Not in any depth. No, they there was very little that was released about it They talk about social distance and they do define some metrics for how they develop that but it's very very light. It's not technically in detail It's actually fairly strange how Mature the product became and how little was ever divulged about it I mean you could actually download it for a short period of time, but the documentation was certainly not very good around it and then I Spent quite a lot of time trying to find those bits Before this because I didn't tended to have a demo of it and those bits are hard to Come by I had them but that VM is lost a long time ago