Microsoft has a vast amount of resources globally contained in sites, portals and blogs for educating its IT Professionals. Rather than undertaking a mammoth content consolidation and audit project, they pivoted to an intelligent ingestion service. The service crawls identified content sources, curating and cataloging information by relevance and quality and presenting the user with a smarter, faster more relevant search experience.
Provoke investigated how a smart ingestion engine would accelerate Microsoft’s discoverability of content to be searched for, or curated into, a Learning Pathway for IT Professionals. Focusing on consumption of content metadata only means that the content remains in its original source repository, and no additional platforms need to be built. The curation aspect of the solution meant certain content can be categorized into a Learning Pathway, and presented to the user though any interface or Learning Management system. The solution ingests various digital assets such as video, PDFs and Power Point presentations from over 30 sources such as YouTube, MSDN, TechNet and LinkedIn Learning.
Additionally, the engine is always learning and improving the quality of data presented through tagging and categorization, identifying duplication, and outdated data for clean-up. Intelligent, auto-scaling load management ensures performance is optimized as volume grows and new sources are consumed for curation. This Azure service is built for rapid scale, ensuring new sources are added quickly through a smart interface.
