Tag Archives: Wiki

Search as an Integrator of Social Intranets

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Wikis, blogs, microblogs, comments, ratings…we all know the buzzwords around the “Social Intranet” by now. Can we consider search as an integrator of Social Intranets?

If the first trend was about getting people to use the new technology, the second seems to be about making sense of all the information that has been created by now.

I sat down with a number of our customers the other week to talk about intranets and internal portals and everyone seemed to face one particular challenge: making sense of the collaborative and social content. How do we make this sort of information searchable without losing the context? And how do we know who the sender is?

One approach which was discussed is to use the people card and search as an integrator between the social components. By using search we can easily integrate everything from microblogging-flows, to comments and contributes in different communities used in the enterprise. The search engine fetches the information and presents it real-time.

Social intranets and search

Social intranets and search

When searching for project One HR on the intranet you can, besides all search hits, get an overview of the owner of the project and all the related discussions that has been going on. Apart from this, networks i.e. people who has been involved can be shown – creating 360° view of the information.

What is your view of the future social intranets? Have you solved the issues with search in collaborative and social content?

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.

A Change of Focus to Search Driven; or Control vs Openness Part Two

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The Shift Towards Portals with Search Driven Functionality

A lot of the people I meet in my work use these new web 2.0 tools daily. They ask me why metadata and taxonomies have to be so complicated when you can do “that web 2.0 stuff” with tagging. They say they prefer “the easy way” and prefer folksonomies over structures; they don’t think they can trust the structures anyway. People, who would like to work in an organization like Charlies.

Traditionally intranets are about control; we want to control what information people get and when and how they get it, instead of trying to make sure that people have the information they need when they need it.

I did some sketches for a search driven portal the other day. One of the comments I got was: “Wow! Why can’t we do that?” Actually, people are doing that. There are dozens of services out there like iGoogle and Superstart; all about customizing the experience for each user. This is like the intranet I want!

In order to achieve this, the companies need a change of focus. It is not about having control over every detail, or about just seizing control. It’s about finding a way to manage communication and make it easier for people to find what they want when they need it.

The search vendors have started to realize that. There is a shift towards portals with search driven functionality.

The design is not static, but reflects what is new and important to you, the specific user.
There are no menus in several levels; instead information about current events and information about what has happened since the last time you visited, take up the information space. Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs can be used internally to improve communication and collaboration.

Are you looking for something special? Search for it! You don’t need to know where it is in order to find the information you are looking for.

This is off course the vision, where few organizations have dared to go. But there are off course exceptions to this. I have been working in a project where there is no fear of seizing control over every little detail. The aim is instead to understand how to best support the users in their work, using enterprise 2.0 tools and search as a vital part of the solution. I would like to see more organizations like Charlie’s…