USPTO Patent Grant: Optimizing Cross-Team Information Flow System

ChangeBridge: Patent Grants - Business Methods (G06Q)

Published March 24th, 2026

Detected March 25th, 2026

Summary

The USPTO has granted patent US12586038B2 to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC for an intelligent system and method to optimize cross-team information flow. The patent describes a system that uses a communication knowledge network graph to rank and recommend posts to users within an organization.

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What changed

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted patent US12586038B2, titled 'Optimizing cross-team information flow system,' to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC. The patent covers an intelligent system and method for enhancing communication within organizations by analyzing user interactions and content to optimize information flow. It details the generation of a communication knowledge network graph to represent user communication events and uses this graph to rank and recommend candidate posts to users, thereby improving how information is disseminated across teams.

This patent grant is primarily of interest to technology companies and employers developing or utilizing internal communication and collaboration platforms. While it does not impose new regulatory obligations, it represents a technological advancement in the field of information management and employee communication. Companies in the technology sector, particularly those developing enterprise software or collaboration tools, should be aware of this patented technology as it may influence future product development and intellectual property considerations in this space.

Source document (simplified)

← USPTO Patent Grants

Intelligent system and method of optimizing cross-team information flow

Grant US12586038B2 Kind: B2 Mar 24, 2026

Assignee

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Inventors

Longqi Yang, Mengting Wan, Cao Lu, Jennifer Lynay Neville, Kiran Tomlinson

Abstract

A system and method and for optimizing cross-team information flow in a communication network includes receiving, from a communication application, via a network, a plurality of candidate post items for display to a first user of an organization, each candidate post item being a post item published by another user of the organization and being a post that is accessible to the first user. A communication knowledge network graph which represents communication events that have occurred between users of the organization is then generated where each communication event is represented by a first node that represents a sender, a second node that represents a receiver and an edge that represents the communication event from the sender to the receiver. For each one of the candidate post items, a value of a total information metric for the communication knowledge network is estimated if one of the plurality of candidate posts is viewed by the first user and the plurality of candidate post items are ranked based on the estimated total information metric before transmitting recommendation data to the communication application for recommending the plurality of candidate posts to the user based on the ranking.