It was an honor to be in New York City late last month with Sandy Rivas, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, to receive a Silver Stevie® Award for Women in Business in the Best New Product of the Year category.
The award was given in recognition of an innovation we implemented with Sandy and her team across Microsoft’s Business Applications Communities, called Intelligent Content Syndication™ (ICS) [subsequently named CommunityConX]. The implementation of ICS was in support of Microsoft’s Power Platform “Better Together” initiative to drive awareness on how Microsoft’s products are able to work better together.
(See what Microsoft has to say about it on their blog post on the PowerBI Community. You may also notice this blog was syndicated (see the icon) to their Power Automate and Power Apps Communities too!)
Developed by iTalent Digital, Intelligent Content Syndication (ICS) [subsequently named CommunityConX] is an innovative technology that intelligently and automatically syndicates content across web platforms in near-real time. The most extraordinary aspect of this innovation is the bi-directional and synchronous nature of the syndication, which enables superior knowledge sharing and expert engagement.
As an example, say someone starts a discussion thread in the online community for Product A, which is also relevant to the users of Product B. Traditionally, this valuable content would be siloed in Product A's community.
But with ICS, the syndication engine automatically syndicates (publishes) the discussion to the community for Product B users, and any engagement around the content (replies, Iikes, comments, etc.) will also be automatically syndicated to both the source and target properties, allowing bi-directional and synchronous collaboration among users on disparate platforms. This was not possible before ICS.
Beyond just communities, content and expertise can be syndicated across an unlimited number of web properties. Moreover, ICS is equipped with an intelligent translation engine (also developed by iTalent) that automatically posts the syndicated content in the language of each target platform. This enables collaboration among users of different native languages in near-real time, creating a truly global customer experience.
The syndication rules are fully customizable. Syndicated content is identified with a special icon, and both the source platform and the author are identified. This allows users across the enterprise ecosystem to find and connect with subject matter experts they may not otherwise have known about.
Microsoft was the first customer to implement ICS, earlier this year. The deployment involved the syndication of event content (videos, presentations, documents and more), as well as individual thread discussions and blogs. Users from across Microsoft's product web properties, including communities, can now access the content and collaborate with experts across product groups without leaving their-home property.
Given the number of products Microsoft supports, no one individual is able to understand how all the products work together. But thanks to ICS, applicable cross-product content and experts that would otherwise not be known about are now surfaced – where the user chooses to be. This creates a better customer experience, and an opportunity for customers to better understand how Microsoft’s ecosystem of products complement each other.
The Stevie® Awards expert judging panel had this to say about ICS:
“This innovation could revolutionize knowledge management.”
“iTalent has developed another winner with ICS.”
“The ICS product’s impact on the software development community will be quite valuable.”
“Incredible technology, very innovative!”
“This technology seems to solve a major development problem with digital content.”
Improves the user experience by allowing them to start and stay in the web property they choose
Creates cross-product awareness, which drives revenues
Sustainably amplifies user engagement
Boosts the visibility of subject matter experts
With the translation capability, connects and serves the global customers
Note: this article was originally published on LinkedIn on December 2, 2019.