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Success Story

Scaling Search and Content Governance with Semantic Technology

Microsoft Docs transformed millions of technical documents into a semantically enriched, scalable knowledge system — improving content governance, accelerating search, and enabling intelligent content delivery.

3,5 M+ Content items
70% Auto-tagging accuracy
8 months Manual tagging effort automated

The Client

Microsoft’s centralized platform for technical documentation serving developers, IT professionals, and end users

The Challenge

Exponential content growth across 450 GitHub repositories, 3,5M pieces of content, 4,500+ authors and 45 Microsoft products created a fragmented, unstructured documentation environment with no unified content model.

The Solution

Microsoft implemented PoolParty to transform millions of documents into a semantically enriched knowledge system for automated classification and improved governance.

Technical capabilities

  • Turned 3.5M content pieces from 450+ repositories into a unified, intelligent documentation platform
  • Automated semantic classification & discovery with > 70% initial accuracy

Business outcomes

  • Cut taxonomy management from weeks to hours and automated 8 months of manual tagging effort
  • Delivered smarter internal search and recommendations, ensuring scalable knowledge governance

The Challenge

As Microsoft Docs grew rapidly following its 2016 launch, the team faced a steep content management challenge:

  • 3,5 million+ content items
  • 450+ GitHub repositories
  • 4,500+ distributed authors
  • 45+ Microsoft products

This complex and decentralized documentation landscape lacked a central content model, making it difficult to ensure findability, consistency, and a high-quality user experience. Manual tagging and classification efforts were time-consuming and inconsistent, slowing down delivery, weakening search functionality, and hampering intelligent site features.

The Solution

To regain control, Microsoft Docs implemented the PoolParty Semantic Suite (now part of the Graphwise Platform) to bring structure, automation, and intelligence to its documentation system. 

This included:

  • Automating tagging workflows using PoolParty’s semantic classification and machine learning
  • Centralizing content regardless of authoring team or location using shared vocabularies and controlled taxonomies
  • Building ontologies to map complex relationships between concepts and products

This semantic infrastructure powered consistent classification, search, and contextual recommendations across the Microsoft Docs ecosystem.

In June 2021, Microsoft Docs started using PoolParty’s corpus management features to programmatically discover new concepts and synonyms by examining own content as well as general industry and competitor resources.

The Impact

By adopting PoolParty’s semantic tools, Microsoft Docs achieved:

  • Accelerated workflows reducing taxonomy management time from weeks to hours and retagging thousands of documents in <1 hour (previously 8–10 hours)
  • Automated tagging replacing 8 months of manual effort
  • Smarter internal search and recommendations with intelligent site features and contextual discovery
  • 70%+ accuracy in tagging during the initial PoC with no training data
  • Scalable knowledge governance to support intelligent content delivery and innovation

Today, Microsoft Docs runs on a future-ready semantic platform that accelerates documentation workflows, strengthens search, and supports enterprise-wide AI strategies.

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Facing Similar Challenges?

Struggling with fragmented documentation, inconsistent tagging, or unscalable content operations? Whether you're dealing with siloed content, slow manual workflows, or limited search functionality, Graphwise can help you:

  • Unify massive documentation landscapes across teams and platforms
  • Automate classification, tagging, and taxonomy governance
  • Enable intelligent content discovery and reuse across your ecosystem

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