Microsoft is incubating two new business-intelligence-focused projects inside its Information Worker (IW) Greenhouse.

The IW Greenhouse, which Microsoft launched in 2003, acts like an internal venture capital arm. The Greenhouse team builds prototypes of potential applications and technologies and then seeks wider, corporate backing and financing for these initiatives. Those that aren't seen as viable are dropped.

The Greenhouse has produced a handful of projects to date. Of these, Ringcam is probably the best known. Microsoft has shown off Ringcam, a video-conferencing device that enables multiple parties to communicate over VOIP, in a variety of public forums, but the technology still has yet to be commercialized. The Greenhouse also has helped shepherd search and various Office and Internet Explorer extensions.

The Greenhouse team is working on a couple of new projects, according to internal company sources.

The first of these projects, known as News to Me, "is an adaptive and dynamic system which analyzes your documents, interactions and activities to automatically deliver timely and relevant information to you," according to a description of the project posted to a Microsoft blog.

Earlier this month, Microsoft removed the blog posting describing the two new IW projects.

"Because this is something they (the Greenhouse team) are currently working on, they are not ready comment on this at this time," said a Microsoft spokeswoman.

The News to Me project is designed to help determine credibility of the growing number of business intelligence sources, defined by the group as blogs, audio casts, RSS feeds, and news of all kinds.

The other project, Business Context Sniffer, "allows the user to 'grab' a mail or an object within the mail, drag it over a 'sniffer pane' and sniff the relevant business context," according to the aforementioned blog posting.

The sniffer is designed to solve a very particular problem. "Business Decision Makers are faced with the problem of managing their business efficiently while living in Outlook. These BDMs spend large parts of their day sorting through uncorrelated ad hoc communications in their in-box. They face the obstacle of quickly finding relevant context in order to act upon them appropriately. Their requests for more relevant context over email generates email replies that exacerbate their in-box workload."

The components of the Business Context Sniffer include a task pane; various sniffer panes that allow users to get dynamic context on incoming e-mails; pre-set and dynamically assigned metadata and keywords; role-specific sniffer filters; and user-defined sniffer filters.

Microsoft IW officials have stated repeatedly over the past year that helping users make better sense of the growing amount of business data they are being requested to digest is a top priority for the company.

This article was updated on February 24 to include official comment from Microsoft.

(This is an updated version of an article which appeared in the February 15, 2006, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter. Want to see what other Microsoft news nuggets you might have missed? Sign up today for a free two-week trial subscription to Microsoft Watch.)