Microsoft is betting on cloud, mobile and social for SharePoint 2013 – Impressions from the SharePoint Conference 2012

Over 10,000 attendees from 85 countries, more than 200 sponsors and exhibitors, and over 250 sessions. Besides these impressive numbers, the 2012 SharePoint conference in Las Vegas has also marked the launch of the new version of SharePoint. Findwise was there to learn and is now sharing with you the news about enterprise search in SharePoint 2013.

In the keynote presentation on the first day of the conference, Jared Spataro (Senior Director, SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft) mentions the three big bets made for the SharePoint 2013 product: CLOUD, MOBILE, and SOCIAL. This post tries to provide a brief overview of what these three buzzwords mean for the enterprise search solution in SharePoint 2013. Before reading this, also check out our previous post about search in SharePoint 2013 to get a taste of what’s new in search.

Search in the cloud

While you have probably heard the saying that “the cloud has altered the economics of computing” (Jared Spataro), you might be wondering how to get there. How to go from where you are now to the so-called cloud. The answer for search is that SharePoint 2013 provides a hybrid approach that helps out in this transition. Hybrid search promises to be the bridge between on-premises and the cloud.

The search results from the cloud and those from on-premise can be shown on the same page with the use of the “result blocks”. The result block, new to SharePoint 2013, is a block of results that are individually ranked and are grouped according to a “query rule”. In short, a query rule defines a condition and an action to be fired when the condition is met. With the use of the result blocks, you can display the search results for content coming from the cloud when searching from an on-premises site and the other way around (depending whether you want the search to be one-way or bidirectional), and you can also conditionally enable these result blocks depending on the query (for example, queries matching specific words or regular expressions).

hybridsearch

Screenshot from the post Hybrid search of the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog showing how results from the cloud are integrated in the search results page when the user searches from an on-premises SharePoint 2013 site.

Before making the decision to move to the cloud, it is wise to check the current features availability for both online and on-premise solutions on TechNet.

Mobile devices

With SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has added native mobile apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone, and iPad, and support across different mobile devices (TechNet), which provides access to information and people wherever the users are searching from.

Also important to mention when talking about mobile, is that the improved REST API widens the extensibility options and allows easy development of custom user experiences across different platforms and devices. The search REST API provides access to the keyword query language parameters, and combining this with a bit of JavaScript and HTML allows developers to quickly start building Apps with custom search experiences and making all information available across devices.

Social search

In the same keynote, Jared Spataro said that Microsoft has “integrated social very deeply into the product, creating new experiences that are really designed to help people collaborate more easily and help companies become more agile.” This was also conveyed by the presence of the two founders of the enterprise social network Yammer in the keynote presentation. The new social features integration means that the information about people following content, people following other people, tags, mentions, posts, discussions, are not only searchable but can be used in improving the relevance of the search results and improving the user experience overall. Also, many of the social features are driven by search, such as the recommendations for people or documents to follow.

Whether you are trying to find an answer to a problem to which the solution has already been posted by somebody else, or whether you are trying to find a person with the right expertise through the people search, SharePoint 2013 provides a more robust and richer social search experience than its previous versions. And the possibilities to extend the out-of-the-box capabilities must be very attractive to businesses that are for example looking to combine the social interactivity inside SharePoint with people data stored in other sources (CRM solutions, file shares, time tracking applications, etc).

Stay tuned!

It was indeed an awesome conference, well organized, but most of the times it was hard to decide which presentation to choose from the many good sessions running at the same time. Luckily (or wisely), we had more than one Findwizard on location!

This post is part of our series of reports from the SharePoint 2012 Conference. Keep an eye on the Findability blog for part two of our report from the biggest SharePoint conference of 2012!

Search Conferences 2011

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

Internet life in the Future

I always think it’s nice when I hear people talking about the same things that are on my mind these days. It makes me reflect upon things in new ways and also makes me realize that I’m on to something. I attended a presentation by Björn Jeffery from Good Old (hosted by Region Västra Götaland). His talk on internet strategy was interesting and had many things in common with the keynote by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo) that I recently heard at the HCI2007 conference. Two things interested me most; the future of mobility and the inevitable question of integrity. So here are my thoughts today, on internet strategy and the future of internet usage.

Integrity

Today young people have become used to using different web 2.0 technologies such as Flickr, Facebook, Delicious etc. So we have seen the emergence of things such as social search and folksonomies. People gladly contribute with information about themselves and what they think and like. I believe this is a good thing, but there are also some risks with this. These risks are that once something is on the internet and is indexed, it’s out there and it stays there. Many people are not aware of that fact. How do you keep your integrity when everything about you can be found online? Integrity is very important when implementing these solutions in an enterprise setting.

How can people contribute without having to share their stuff with everyone else if they don’t want to? Björn Jeffery mentioned that we’ve gone from sharing nothing with noone to sharing everything with everyone and that he thought this would change back to us sharing a lot of things with many people. I hope he’s right. Teenagers might note care who they share their stuff with, but security and integrity are vital issues when considering enterprise solutions.

Mobility

In these days mobility has become an important thing. We not only expect to be able to find the information we need but to find it whenever we want from where ever we want to. I am actually writing this blog post on a train, and off course I expect to have access to all Findwise and other resources from here as well. As technology changes our behavior and expectations change with it, and so does society. (I covered excitement generators in a previous post about Jared Spools keynote on HCI2007.)

“I don’t use computers, love. This is just the internet”.

quote from Elizabeth Churchills keynote

Today there is no longer an association between internet and the computer screen. Mobile phones have become an increasingly popular way of accessing the internet. So, you can use search to access all your company’s information from a single point of access when ever you need it. Then maybe next step is mobile search on your intranet? That would not only make information become available at all time but from where ever you might be, and exactly when you want it.

So in conclusion of these talks; I think that in the future we will want to be able to access everything from everywhere at any time. We used to talk about time we spent online. That distinction isn’t really there any more. Today our tasks are interweawed, we don’t separate time we spend online and offline. (Something that becomes painfully obvious when trying to work on the train when you’ve forgotten the usbconnection for the mobile internet.) And in that time we spend online we also need to define what things we want to share with whom. If we as designers can solve these things, I think we’re on to something promising.

The Flexibility of Internet Search

The expression “have you googled it?” meaning “did you search for it on the internet?” shows what an impact the worlds most valuable brand has made on people.

However, new development has provided several new and flexible ways of using search. The traditional way of searching often helps you find specific information that you know exist (presented in endless hit lists). Another approach is to let search help you find the things you didn’t know existed, but most likely help you put things into new perspectives.

One example is the recommended search solutions, such as music map or live plasma, which finds music or movies that are related to your search term and that you most likely will appreciate. Another example is what to rent that, by using different people’s preferences and searches, can recommend a good movie for your weekend.

Interesting and innovative approaches are also made by Chacha (a people powered search engine that actually has real people guiding you in the information jungle, helping you explore new information) and Speeglebot (that talks to you).

I could go on and on about these new solutions, but instead just conclude by saying that search provides the platform for gathering loads of knowledge from different sources and people, and presenting it in new ways! Keep your eyes open for these upcoming solutions, it won’t be long until it is used within your enterprise to find related information and people that will revolutionize your way of finding information.