HP Labs Compass is the service for employees to orient themselves within their organization and navigate their way to the people and the information they need. Through tools for easily sharing, discovering, and socializing - Compass helps employees make better decisions faster because they are better connected and better informed.

Enterprise social networking applications are top of mind for everyone from CEOs and Presidents on down, and managers are watching to see how they take off. So far, however, lackluster adoption has emerged as the biggest obstacle to widespread use. These services typically require large amounts of time to build up value. For each new tool, every user has a new profile to create, interests to declare, and time to interact before receiving any valuable return. And, different tools are often used by different groups, resulting in disparate pockets of information and people throughout a company.

HP Labs Compass is different. Compass runs on a knowledge harvest and discovery ecosystem which gleans assets that already exist within your enterprise, allowing it to provide value to users on day one. That means that users don’t need to start from scratch in order to benefit from the service.

Knowledge discovery

Compass supports discovery - not just search. Often, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know that can be the missing piece of the puzzle. Compass helps by showcasing recommendations of assets, colleagues, and activity within the organization personalized for you.

Easy sharing

Compass also provides an easy path for sharing and socializing content within the enterprise. Through our mobile experience, you can follow and create collections of people and assets that give you real-time insight into the changing intellectual capital of your organization.

Via the Compass simple enterprise publishing feature, you can drag-and-drop a file, or cut-and-paste a web link on any Compass page. Compass automatically analyzes this content, including tagging and describing it, and provides you with a unique page and a custom URL you can use to invite others to view and socialize around your content. Both viewers and contributors can browse this content directly through our HTML5 web-based interface and mobile applications.

Recommendations, just for you

In addition to the insights about who has viewed, commented on, or shared a particular asset, you will also see similar assets and related people. These recommendations are unique to the person viewing the asset and to the asset itself. Since Compass is connected into your company’s entire knowledge directory, as soon as you share a new presentation, you can see other people that are working on that topic and other documents related to your work. As your organization changes, your recommendations change too, making sure you’re always up to speed.

HP Labs Compass

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Collections tell you more

In addition to easily sharing and discovering knowledge, Collections provide a way for you to create connections between people and the assets that you and your colleagues have shared.

Compass Collections bring the value of socially-curated content to the enterprise. When you are able to see that a presentation is part of a collection that also includes a whitepaper on the topic, two related news articles, and three team members, you have much more context than if you had simply received the presentation as an email attachment. And following the collection allows you to receive activity updates in real time, giving you deeper insight and exposure to the relevant people and information included.

HP Labs research turns a big enterprise challenge into simple tools for collaborationEnabling knowledge discovery and social collaboration within the enterprise isn’t easy. There are complex challenges to solve – such as intra-enterprise search, ease of use, and understanding the incentive of how and why people collaborate – all of which HP Labs is addressing. To deliver Compass, we have integrated knowledge harvesting, analytics, and user experience innovations covered

by over 10 patents generated by our global team of researchers, hailing from 5 different countries. As a global provider of enterprise services, HP works across many different industries, giving us visibility and insight into a variety of our customers’ needs. And, HP has the skills to transform leading-edge technologies from HP Labs into business solutions.

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© Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Created May 2012