Today’s information-centric businesses are demanding a single point of access to all internal, and even some external, information. Portal and content management software have made strides in this direction, but lack the necessary infrastructure to pull together unstructured content and structured data from diverse sources. This thought-provoking session explores the emergence of a new information infrastructure or middleware layer that contains modules to acquire, manage, analyze, and create access to all kinds of information. Today, we throw a search engine or database at every information task and then mourn the fact that we can’t find what we need. Sue Feldman will discuss how an information infrastructure can change how we handle information within the organization and what this means for search.

Just as interface stands on the shoulders of infrastructure, effective search relies on a foundation of information architecture. A positive user experience depends upon the intelligent integration of the search engine, search and results interfaces, content, metadata, controlled vocabularies, and relevance ranking and clustering algorithms. In this fast-paced session, Peter Morville draws upon case studies, best-in-class examples, and proven strategies to describe how to build a successful information architecture and search system within the challenging environment of a large distributed enterprise.

A lot of mumbo-jumbo is thrown around today to describe how to manage so-called unstructured content such as business documents, Web site pages, and old-fashioned technical reports and articles. On the one hand, we need to remember what we already know about how to create a useful core catalog record to describe a content object so it can be found again later. On the other hand, we need to get beyond some bad habits and obsolete ideas like inverted file indexes. In this experienced-based session, Joe Busch describes what he has seen in dozens of applied information management projects over the past few years, and how you can take advantage of what you already know to solve big problems like these in your own organization.

Adding metadata can be difficult and costly, and documents merit different levels of content description, depending on a variety of criteria such as authority, strategic value, popularity, and re-usability. This thought-provoking session explores strategies for balancing the level of content description with business demands for ROI. Drawing on practical examples, learn how to develop a strategic perspective on metadata implementation that balances your investment
in time, money, and effort with the full range of business value of your content.

Learn how a CMS impacts your site search functionality, and vice versa. Tony Byrne, a well-known content management guru, discusses how to integrate your content management system with search, enhancing enterprise-wide performance and ROI. He will cover practical issues, including what search software may be bundled with your content management system and whether it can do the job, content retrieval within your content management system versus site search, and dynamic versus static content management models and their impact on search.

Take advantage of this last chance to talk with experts from the leading enterprise search software companies, pick up some materials, and learn how their products might meet your needs.

Implementing a search engine is never trivial and often complex. Avi Rappoport’s top 10 reasons why search fails will help you avoid the most common problems. According to Pareto’s Principal (the 80/20 rule), she shows how simple search solutions, decent interfaces, and good integration with information architecture and content management systems can solve many information access requirements—saving sophisticated search functions and classifications for complex situations where better answers make a significant difference to the enterprise.

Hear the outlook for the enterprise search industry and peer into the future with Ovum analyst Eric Woods. Go beyond today’s tactical search issues and gain an insight into the technologies that are redefining how people search and navigate through large volumes of structured and unstructured information. Woods will look at key areas of innovation that are reshaping search, including dynamic taxonomies, expertise location and collaboration, multilingual support, search analytics, visualization, and more. He will argue, however, that the real transformation will come from the integration of these innovations, establishing advanced search and discovery technologies as core elements of the corporate infrastructure. At the conclusion of his remarks, a panel of Enterprise Search Summit faculty will join Woods for a discussion and questions from the audience.