Project Cortex - Why Office 365 users should consider it

Learn more about Project Cortex on the Microsoft site here

This is not the first time that organizations have attempted to harness the knowledge in their content. In the 90s, several reputed vendors of content management provided knowledge management capabilities, but it required manual effort to classify and tag the content as well as constant curation and knowledge management. The lack of automation of this process was one of the primary reasons why organizations failed to extract knowledge and introduce this into the mainstream.

We see this repeating in the modern world of content and collaboration with Office 365. Every user wants to save their content somewhere in Office 365, but no one has the willingness or the patience to categorize it and set the right metadata which is mandatory for any good knowledge management system.

If you consider the DIKW pyramid, most organizations are still stuck in the Data and Information layer with a desire to move up to harnessing Knowledge and Wisdom.

Today, the technology has evolved significantly with the advent of Artificial Intelligence and advanced search and indexing. The introduction of Project Cortex built on these modern technologies could be the answer to addressing content chaos. Microsoft has made investments in improving the core classification and content tagging mechanism by improving how content types and taxonomy are managed, which is essential.

I is now becoming mainstream in Office 365 and this is the key to automating all those auto-classification and fact-extraction tasks that users hate to do manually. These AI-led processes will help to automatically change Data to Information.

The biggest contribution of Project Cortex is the introduction of the Knowledge Graph (don’t confuse this with the Microsoft Graph API), to store complex associations of facts automatically extract using AI. This is what drives the Knowledge layer in Project Cortex and what surfaces this knowledge in all the Office applications including Outlook, SharePoint, and Word.

Having spent over a decade helping organizations move to Office 365 from various legacy ECM platforms, we at Proventeq have seen how the quality of information has stagnated over time in these legacy platforms. Project Cortex is Microsoft’s answer to avoid the same happening in Office 365. This will help organizations make their business content contextual, relevant, and actionable.

Also, Microsoft has ambitions to integrate knowledge with various Line of Business applications, such as Dynamics, ServiceNow, Salesforce etc. This indicates their drive to integrate Office 365’s suite of applications with Business applications to harness the full potential of a digital workplace and harness the potential knowledge that is locked within various business applications from the past.

At Proventeq, we have the expertise in working with complex legacy ECM systems and transforming them to work with modern Digital workplace solutions built using Office 365 that also integrates with various business applications. We help organizations rapidly take advantage of knowledge and automation into their heart of content services and collaboration ecosystems.

Proventeq is a Microsoft Gold Partner and a Microsoft Preferred Partner in Content Services.