Project Cortex

Information Leadership was thrilled to participate in the inaugural 'Content Kitchen' at Microsoft US headquarters last week to expand their understanding of Project Cortex and the value it will add to New Zealand customers.

The event was restricted to selected partners including the exclusive Content Services Programme, of which Information Leadership is one of twenty four partners world-wide.

New frontiers in knowledge management

Project Cortex is the new knowledge network in Office 365 and is being released in the second half of 2020.

Over one hundred developers and solution architects from across the globe attended the two day event, all eager to learn first hand from the Project Cortex product team about the solution and how to implement it.

Greg Jack, Senior Digital Workplace Consultant, from Information Leadership attended and reflected upon his return, "Microsoft are yet again upping the ante on what digital workplaces can deliver. I'm super excited by Project Cortex’s potential to bring alive organisational knowledge and improve the efficiency of content-centric processes across multiple systems."

Discussions at the Content Kitchen focused on AI-driven, topic-curated knowledge repositories and how AI will be used to inform business processes. Specific sessions at the two day event included modern managed metadata, search extensibility, customising AI models, mining knowledge and applying AI to improve security and compliance.

Project Cortex will be accessed primarily from SharePoint Online and Office 365 apps and uses the Azure LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service), Power Platform AI Builder and Azure Computer Vision technologies.

Information Leadership Director and Strategy Lead, Grant Margison, notes that many of their New Zealand customers are embracing Office 365 and are ready to take it to the next level.

"Project Cortex binds and structures content across Teams, SharePoint, Exchange and other systems in ways not previously possible"

"Project Cortex binds and structures content across Teams, SharePoint, Exchange and other systems in ways not previously possible. We have always been excited about delivering on the promise of users having knowledge at their fingertips and now see many new ways to forward this aspiration with Project Cortex and our iWorkplace framework for Microsoft 365", says Grant.

Microsoft's Director of Project Cortex, Naomi Moneypenny, explains how the SharePoint platform is being used to improve knowledge management here.