Tag Archives: search capabilities

Tagging, Social Networks, Interaction and Findability

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Events the past days has got me thinking about the power of social tagging and its connection to findability. Thoughts that commend me to writing my most personal (and perhaps off topic) post yet on this blog. (All thoughts expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer.)

Rumors about the shut down of Delicious have been circling the web. Even though it is still unconfirmed from Yahoo, my Twitter feed has been filled with comments about how to save your bookmarks, export bookmarks to other services, petitions to Yahoo about saving Delicious or making it open source.

Traditionally when talking about user tagging of content the topic is re-finding things. Users tag information on the web or an intranet in order to be able to find their way back to them. However most of the comments that I’ve seen about Delicious being shut down has nothing to do with this. As I see it, users don’t claim to be missing the bookmarks themselves, but the social network, research, collaboration and search capabilities that came with the bookmarking service. Delicious seems to have emerged from a service that helps you bookmark your things for re-finding them to a service that helps you find new things based on the tagging of others. Tagging, or social bookmarking may very well have started as a way of re-finding your information but has grown into a new way of discovering information, in parallel to search. (Maybe that is an explanation to the tweets wishing for Google to buy delicious from Yahoo?)

So, tagging can not only help you re-find your own stuff but also explore new things and spread information. One good example of this is what is currently going on in the swedish Twitterverse. It all started with one journalist’s discussion with her friends about the disbelief towards the women accusing Julian Assange of sexual assault. It quickly turned into so much more; a profound discussion about the fine lines of sexuality, what is OK, what we want and like and how to say no. Using the hash tag #prataomdet swedish twitter users are writing about and discussing their experiences in an effort to change the cultural climate so that people talk about it, start communicating with each other about sexuality. You can easily follow all the tweets real time and read blog posts on the topic at prataomdet.se. Many of the major news sites have now started reporting on this as well after the massive activity on twitter. (For non-swedish speaking readers an effort has also been made to start discussions in English as well at #talkaboutit on twitter.)

The feed in itself is thought provoking and can easily keep you busy for hours. Besides the content and openness of the discussions I find something else amazing. In a matter of hours this one tag joined together users, many of whom have never interacted with each other before, helping them share and find new information about something that was unspoken of earlier. Combining the power of social networks and tagging made this possible.

I usually write very different sorts of blog posts at this blog. This one time I just wanted to revel over the amazing possibilities for interaction that technology offers us today. Then maybe the next step is to think about how to tap into this power of interaction and how findability within the enterprise can benefit from this as well. In the mean time I recommend reading about What social networks reveal about interaction or how Västra Götalands Region are currently working on incorporating user tagging into their metadata.

Search in SharePoint 2010

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This week there has been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Since SharePoint 2007 has been the quickest growing server product in the history of Microsoft, the expectations on SharePoint 2010 are tremendous. And also great expectations for search in Sharepoint 2010

Apart from a great deal of possibilities when it comes to content creation, collaboration and networking, easy business intelligence etc. the launch also holds another promise: that of even better capabilities for search in Sharepoint 2010 (with the integration of FAST).

Since Microsoft acquired FAST in 2008, there have been a lot of speculations about what the future SharePoint versions may include in terms of search. And since Microsoft announced that they will drop their Linux and UNIX versions in order to focus on higher innovation speed, Microsoft customer are expecting something more than the regular. In an early phase it was also clear that Microsoft is eager to take market shares from the growing market in internet business.

So, simply put, the solutions that Microsoft now provide in terms of search is solutions for Business productivity (where the truly sophisticated search capabilities are available if you have Enterprise CAL-licenses, i.e. you pay for the number of users you have) and Internet Sites (where the pricing is based on the number of servers). These can then be used in a number of scenarios, all dependent on the business and end-user needs.
Microsoft has chosen to describe it like this:

  • “Foundation” is, briefly put, basic SharePoint search (Site Search).
  • “Standard” adds collaboration features to the “Foundation” edition and allows it to tie into repositories outside of SharePoint.
  • “Enterprise ” adds a number of capabilities, previously only available through FAST licenses, such as contextual search (recognition of departments, names, geographies etc), ability to tag meta data to unstructured content, more scalability etc.

I’m not going to go into detail, rather just conclude that the more Microsoft technology the company or organization already use, the more benefits it will gain from investing in SharePoint search capabilities.

And just to be clear:  non-SharePoint versions (stand-alone) of FAST are still available, even though they are not promoted as intense as the SharePoint ones.

Apart from Microsoft’s overview above, Microsoft Technet provides a more deepdrawing description of the features and functionality from both an end-user and administrator point of view.

We look forward describing the features and functions in more detail in our upcoming customer cases. If you have any questions to our SharePoint or FAST search specialist, don’t hesitate to post them here on the blog. We’ll make sure you get all the answers.

Basic Enterprise Search is a Commodity – Let’s Go Further! Trends for 2008

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So looking ahead, what are the trends for enterprise search 2008? Well, we have already been talking about Microsoft and IBM and there are a few other vendors (such as Google and Oracle) that have presented ways to develop their enterprise search solutions (looking at clustering, categorisation, taxonomies, entity extraction, visualisation etc.). To conclude: the simple search box is soon a commodity – a search solution for enterprises has to go beyond this.

As a result, experts believe that 2008 will become a year with stronger cooperation and more strategic differentiation among the leading vendors.

BI and search is one example, search within Rich Media (video, speech and music) another. The largest vendors are looking at new ways to develop and enrich their search capabilities and acquisitions of, or cooperation with, other companies is most likely to continue.

The next trend for 2008 is something that I personally look forward to: the user revolution
Enterprise search has for a long time been focusing on technical aspects, such as ability to scale, linguistics features etc. The predicted new era uses enterprise search as a tool based on user needs. At Findwise we have rapidly become clear of this since the need for our usability expert is great. Her work focuses on the end-user, and how the technical platforms can be used to support his or her everyday work. My believe is that this perspective will bridge the gap between IT and business, making enterprise search a tool to enable information retrieval and access in new ways.

What is your opinion? Are there more things to add for the future of enterprise search the following year?

Findwise wish you all a Happy New Year and look forward hearing from you in 2008!

Basic Enterprise Search is a Commodity – Let’s Go Further! Conclusions of Trends 2007

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Looking back at the search trends that were predicted for 2007 one can conclude that many of the larger research institutes, such as Forrester and Gartner, made a great forecast.

2007 was supposed to raise the question of 2.0 for search technology within the companies (and it seems like wikis, blogs and collaborative tools was all that we heard about for some months). Further on, there was a discussion of integration with business tools, such as BI and search, to create more powerful ways to extract critical data from several sources. The fact that IBM bought Cognos and FAST Radar says something about what we can expect in the future.

During the last months there has been a discussion of more sophisticated ways to develop enterprise search. The leading niche vendors such as Autonomy, FAST and Endeca have for the last few years been evangelists for search that goes beyond spellchecking and synonyms – talking in terms of information retrieval and knowledge management. It seems like a lot of companies have evaluated search capabilities, starting with basic functions, simply to realise that search actually solves a lot of problems they haven’t even considered.

It’s not a coincidence that giants such as IBM and Microsoft have strategies that will bring their enterprise search capabilities to new levels 2008.