I was not the only Dutch attendent. Sjoerd de Valk of Winvision, who I met at the Las Vegas SharePoint Conference last year, came to hear the story too.
In my earlier blog I explained that I was triggered by the description of the content of this seminar. First by stating that Enterprise search projects very often are started with a high ambition. In the session of Paul Hermans this was explained on a lively manner.
In my opinion the common mistake to start with a under estimated complexity should be taken even more serious. Before starting to implement a enterprise search infrastrucure, be sure you have a vision and a strategy on information. That's an important start indeed. Next do not start to implement the Search infrastructure before you have a Access and Authentication infrastructure you can use to implement the search upon. True, but not that easy too! Third do not try to implement this huge one interface, this single user experience for all users or rolls in the entire enterprise. Build applications on top of the search infrastructure layer. Last but not least pay attention to the user, manage the change and build trust.
Not a bad apporach. In my opinion it is smart to devide the information demand of the enterprise into smaller chunks. When this is done in the 'envisioning fase' where the vision and strategy of the information access is build, the implementation of different information goals can be split up. More smaller projects, building the total enterprise search ambition over time.
The experience of Amplexor in this field wasn't illustrated with a lot of customer cases. Overall a nice session. Thanks Paul.
The last parts of the seminar the technology and functionality of the search infrastructure was presented by two people of Microsoft. Both former FAST employees; Wolgang Mederle and Hilde Rietveld. Most of the stuf I've seen before on SharePoint or other Microsoft conferences and events. Important to notice is that the promises of Microsoft and FAST in 2008 when FAST was acquired by Microsoft are fullfilled in the new product versions of FAST and Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
Important additions as advanced people search as part of knowledge managment, facetted and federated search, ranking and search advise are now available in the new products.
Nice work FAST and Microsoft.
There are some good comparison sheets available on the Microsoft Technet side. For example the poster were the product specs are compared:
- SharePoint Foundation 2010
- Search Server 2010 Express
- Search Server 2010
- SharePoint Server 2010
- FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
So are there some examples that use these technology's. There were some demo's based on real life enterprise search implementations:
Scirus - a scientific database /try flu. By filling in a search query you get results in body. On the left bar there are two main sources for the results: journals and other web. These are facets. You can refine your search by choosing journals or the federated other websources. On the bottom there is another part that can help you to refine your query with advised keywords.
Times online - by opening a topic (search) a newspaper site is composed. A topis is realy a composition of related articles post on the same position of the page. Again you can recognise the facets and federated search results on the left. On the backend of this site Times has implemented a business model. Content of Times itself is sold for further reading.
Some other examples:
- Wolters Kluwer
- Read Elsevier (MOSS and ESP)
- NXP
- Thomson Reuters
