Tag Archives: content management

Tutorial: Optimising Your Content for Findability

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This tutorial was done on the 6th of November at J. Boye 2012 conference in Aarhus Denmark. Tutorial was done by Kristian Norling.

Findability and Your Content

As the amount of content continues to increase, new approaches are required to provide good user experiences. Findability has been introduced as a new term among content strategists and information architects and is most easily explained as:

“A state where all information is findable and an approach to reaching that state.”

Search technology is readily used to make information findable, but as many have realized technology alone is unfortunately not enough. To achieve findability additional activities across several important dimensions such as business, user, information and organisation are needed.

Search engine optimisation is one aspect of findability and many of the principles from SEO works in a intranet or website search context. This is sometimes called Enterprise Search Engine Optimisation (ESEO). Getting findability to work well for your website or intranet is a difficult task, that needs continuos work. It requires stamina, persistence, endurance, patience and of course time and money (resources).

Tutorial Topics

In this tutorial you will take a deep dive into the many aspects of findability, with some good practices on how to improve findability:

  • Enterprise Search Engines vs Web Search
  • Governance
  • Organisation
  • User involvement
  • Optimise content for findability
  • Metadata
  • Search Analytics

Brief Outline

We will start some very brief theory and then use real examples and also talk about what organisations that are most satisfied with their findability do.

Experience level

Participants should have some intranet/website experience. A basic understanding of HTML, with some previous work with content management will make your tutorial experience even better. A bonus if you have done some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for public websites.

Content Choreography?

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Is getting the right content to the right users and customers a priority for you and your organisation? Do you drown in too much information? With some insight into how to manage content your answer is probably “Yes!”.

Today we have loads of channels to choose from, e-mails, internet/intranets, Yammer feeds, blogs and different collaboration platforms and social media services. Some content is more beneficial in one channel and other content in another channel. But how do you make sure the right information reaches the right users, in the right channels?

Content Choreography aims to handle all that; Content, strategy, format and delivery.

We need to tailor the user/customer experience in order to achieve good Findability. How? Taxonomy, Metadata and Search!
Taxonomy to ensure that we speak the same language, metadata to classify the content to fulfill a certain task or objective and search to deliver it to the right channel.

Need more information about Content Choreography?
Join us in our joint seminar with KnowIT, Nov 22nd: Future Choreography of Content Management, where Seth Earley – CEO at Early Associates will speak about Content Choreography – The Art of Dynamic Web Content. Seth Earley have more than 20 years experience in the field and is a very eloquent and interesting speaker. He will share his thoughts and ideas gathered from a number of large customers worldwide.

More information and registration can be found here.

Search Conferences 2011

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During 2011 a large number of search conferences will take place all over the world. Some of them are dedicated to search, whereas others discuss the topic related to specific products, information management, usability etc.

Here are a few that might be of interest for those of you looking to be inspired and broaden your knowledge. Within a few weeks we will compile all the research related conferences – there are quite a few of them out there!
If there is anything you miss, please post a comment.

March
IntraTeam Event Copenhagen 2011
Main focus: Social intranets, SharePoint and Enterprise Search
March 1, 2 and 3, 2011, Copenhagen, Denmark

Webcoast
Main focus: A web event that is an unconference, meaning that the attendees themselves create the program by presenting on topics of their own expertise and interest.
March 18-20 , Gothenburg, Sweden

Info360
Main focus: Business productivity, Enterprise Content Management, SharePoint 2010
March 21-24, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, USA

April
International Search Summit Munich
Main focus: International search and social media.
4th April 2011, Hilton Munich Park Hotel, Germany

ECIR 2011: European Conference on Information Retrieval
Main focus: Presentation of new research results in the field of Information Retrieval
April18-21, Dublin, Ireland

May
Enterprise Search Summit Spring 2011
Main focus: Develop, implement and enhance cutting-edge internal search capabilities
May 10-11, New York, USA

International Search Summit: London
Main focus: International search and social media
May 18th, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London, England

Lucene Revolution
Main focus: The world’s largest conference dedicated to open source search.
May 25-26, San Francisco Airport Hyatt Regency, USA

SharePoint Fest – Denver 2011
Main focus: In search track: Enterprise Search, Search & Records Management, & FAST for SharePoint
May 19-20, Colorado Convention Center, USA

June
International Search Summit Seattle
Main focus: International search and social media
June 9th, Bell Harbor Conference Center, Seattle, USA

2011 Semantic Technology Conference
Main focus: Semantic technologies – including Search, Content Management, Business Intelligence
June 5-9, Hilton Union Square, San Francisco, USA

October
SharePoint Conference 2011
Main focus: SharePoint and related technologies
October 3-6, Anaheim, California, USA

November
Enterprise Search Summit Fall Nov 1-3
Main focus: How to implement, manage, and enhance search in your organization
Integrated with the KMWorld Conference, SharePoint Symposium and Taxonomy Bootcamp,

KM-world
(Co-locating with Enterprise Search Summit Fall, Taxonomy Boot Camp and Sharepoint Symposium)
Main focus: Knowledge creation, publishing, sharing, finding, mining, reuse etc
November 1 – 3, Washington Marriott Wardman Park, Washington DC, USA

Gilbane group Boston
Main focus: Within search: semantic, mobile, SharePoint, social search
November 29 – December 1, Boston, USA

If a Piece of Content is Never Read, Does it Really Exist?

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Since ancient times, information technology has developed from carvings in rock and wood to cell phones and Facebook. Still, the basic purpose remains the same; to facilitate communication between people separated by space and time. Therefore one can measure the successfulness of any information tool by two axes: how easy it is to create information and how easy it is to consume it. Being a Findability expert, I spend a large part of my life focusing on the latter. Therefore it troubles me that so many organizations wait so long when they are introducing new content management systems before looking at search. If I had a nickel for every time I heard “we are currently busy with building our new intranet/web page/collaboration tool and will look at search when the project is finished” I would definitely have had a few quarters by now.

I like to say that I am in the information marketing business. What I mean by that is that Findability is all about marketing information so that the consumers, your employees, can find the piece of information they need. And just as an industrialist would not construct a factory before doing a marketing plan, you should not build a new information repository without thinking about how the content created in that repository will reach its target audience. When marketing information, search is one of your most important channels.

While a enterprise search solution can definitely smooth out imperfections in information structure and quality using intelligent algorithms, spending a little time thinking about how you can make it easier for a search engine to deliver relevant results presented in a user friendly way can really make it shine. Some questions you can ask yourself are:

  • How can we make tagging so convenient that we have good metadata for presenting and filtering results using facets? Many search solutions have automated tagging functionality to take load off users.
  • How can we use search as an integration platform to pull in content from other sources instead of making costly one-time integrations?
  • How will the new information repository fit into an existing search solution, for example are we changing the metadata model and how should the documents be ranked compared to other sources?
  • Should we migrate content from an old system to the new one or just freeze information creation in the old one and have a search box that let’s the user find information from both?
  • Can we use search to avoid creating duplicate information by encouraging users to make searches before typing new content or even doing implicit searches while the user is typing?

So does a piece of content that no one ever reads exist? Well in terms of bits on a disk in a data center, yes, but in terms of business value definitely no. Designing your information repository for Findability will have great returns in improved efficiency and user satisfaction.

The Business Case for Enterprise Search

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1. Achieve higher employee efficiency levels by providing company-wide, swift access to relevant information

Every business day, employees need to access information stored in various enterprise applications and databases. Enterprise Search addresses this need by providing your co-workers with swift access to relevant information and by consolidating, ranking and presenting it properly. The value proposition of enterprise search is thus to promote core business by enabling co-workers to work more efficiently, to avoid redoing work done elsewhere and to produce better quality as the information they need can be found through one single search solution.

2. Make more money by providing revenue-driving business processes with tailored means to access and act on information

The larger the corporation, the more different information access needs. Besides providing large user groups with general access to corporate information, an Enterprise Search solution can be tailored to meet the specific needs of revenue-driving business processes such as solution sales, business intelligence, patent management and mergers and acquisitions. There might not be that many people working in these areas, but the outcome of their work can have a tremendous impact on the bottom line of your company.

3. Leverage the hidden value of existing IT investments

The return on investment of Enterprise Search is not only a matter of getting your money’s worth for the license and deployment costs of the Enterprise Search solution. As the solution makes all the information hidden in document repositories findable through one search solution, the Enterprise Search solution will in fact help you get a return on investment on content management investments already made.

4. Lower your IT costs by centralizing access to information

Reduce your license, maintenance and support costs by providing one centralized Enterprise Search platform to handle all information access requests. Most companies store information in various information systems such as intranets and web sites, collaboration portals, document management systems, CRM and ERP systems and many other enterprise applications and databases. A typical set-up is to have separate search tools for each of these systems. By using your Enterprise Search platform as a service, you can replace these siloed search functions with one centrally monitored platform that provides search to each of these applications. In this way, you can reduce the annual costs on licenses, maintenance and support for separate search applications.

Roadmap FAST Search for Sharepoint and Internet Business

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In view of the fact that it has been a year since Microsoft acquired FAST search, there has been a lot of hush-hush about the Enterprise search roadmap. However, at the yearly FAST forward conference, Microsoft’s press release Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map reached the public.

There are no big surprises, but a lot of interesting details to come. Briefly speaking Microsoft is focusing on two areas: search to enhance business productivity and search to earn money online.

Sharepoint and FAST ESP

Here at Findwise we have been working with customers integrating SharePoint and FAST ESP for some time, and ESP certainly adds a lot of value by extending SharePoint’s main strengths: content management and collaboration. Office 14, which will probably see the light early next year, will hopefully add more flexibility to their infrastructure solutions out of the box.

More information about the licensing models are yet to come and even though FAST search will continue to develop ESP as a standalone (to run on both Unix and Linux), the roadmap ties existing and potential Microsoft customers closer by presenting search as an integrated part of their business productivity offering.

As for FAST Search Internet Business Microsoft’s target group are companies looking for earning money online. During FAST forward 2007 there was a lot of talk about the future search driven portals and during the 2008 event about the ability to understanding user intent.

Today online consumers have higher expectations when it comes to search and the ability to show related information (such as Amazon’s “people that bought this product also bought”..) as well as showing contextual advertising (related to search terms, geographical location etc) and recommendations will create loyal customers. FAST search has quite a few customers using search for strategic online business so one should keep an eye on the release of the new beta version during 2009.

If you read Swedish, Helge Legernes, one of the founders of Findwise is giving his comment in Computer Sweden.