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This case study presents the recent redesign of MSWeb, the primary portal to the content and services of Microsoft's corporate intranet. First launched in 1995, MSWeb experienced a content explosion, growing to include more than 2 million pages by 1998 and forcing a major redesign.

In this session, Vivian describes the top-down and bottom-up methods that her Knowledge Architecture group employed over an 18 month period to develop a robust and extensible information architecture. Work products and deliverables included processes, search strategies, databases, tools, metadata schema, controlled vocabularies, and a user interface.

Vivian explains how the expertise of her team contributed to a successful rollout in December 1999, covering areas such as:

• users' needs and information seeking behaviors,
• interface design,
• content,
• technology,
• stakeholder goals, and
• business objectives.