Enterprises often attempt to address findability problems by installing a search engine. Search can improve performance, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. To develop search to its greatest potential, organizations need to take a big-picture view of how users find information and integrate taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, contextual navigation, and related solutions with search. In this thought-provoking keynote, Lou Rosenfeld outlines a road map for a broad enterprise information architecture that will give you a jump-start on an integrated, coherent approach to improving findability. The end result is an enterprise information architecture that helps users find the information they need.

What is common practice for search and metadata? How can you determine where your practices fall short and where they exceed the norm? To help you benchmark your own organization, this session presents a “metadata maturity model.” The model looks at search and metadata handling within an organization, including metadata and taxonomy standards, tools and tool selection, staff hiring and training, data creation and QA, project management, and executive support. Within each of those areas, specific practices are called out that indicate if an organization’s handling of search and metadata is at a beginning, intermediate, or advanced level.

The Enterprise Search Showcase features tabletop displays and demonstrations by 26 leading enterprise search software and solutions vendors. Attendees are invited to browse the displays and compare the features of the different products by talking with knowledgeable support staff from each company.

Comparing industrial-strength search engines and their advanced features is difficult unless you can see them in action. During Enterprise Search Summit, the Enterprise Search Clinics will present brief tutorials and demos of important enterprise search engines and tools given by product experts from the sponsoring companies. Attendees will gain a basic understanding of how each works and how each one differs. 

This case study will describe MITRE’s implementation and use of the Google Enterprise Search appliance for its corporate intranet search, including decisions leading up to the selection, and MITRE’s experience with the appliance implementation, collection design, content integration, and usage patterns and user experiences. Hear also about a unique application, Expertise Finder, that allows users to identify MITRE expertise based on indexed content, plus special searchable repositories, including e-mail list messages, as well as content from internal publishing repositories, such as Microsoft SharePoint document libraries. 

J&JPRD has it all—custom attribute indexing, taxonomies, data integration, data standardization, custom manual filtering, unstructured data, text parsing, etc. However, search is still seen as a commodity and not a base enterprise infrastructure component, so there is a diverse information landscape and multiple search and retrieval approaches. Given the reality that all of these components must co-exist, find out how J&JPRD has provided a search layer on top that makes the connection for the user at the time of retrieval. Learn how J&JPRD integrated a number of products to create an elegant search solution. 

Listen as this panel of experts shares their comments and insights about these case studies on implementing search using two very different search tools. Get their advice on lessons you can take away from the experiences at MITRE and Johnson & Johnson. 

Join your colleagues and the Enterprise Search Summit instructors and sponsors for lunch and thought-provoking discussions. Share questions, experiences, and problems, and maybe find some answers while you enjoy a delicious meal. 

The implementation of enterprise search is an ongoing activity that must constantly balance evolving user needs, business requirements, and technical capabilities. Where and how do you start? The decision about which search software to add to your intranet, an enterprise portal, or how to find relevant information across different information repositories is increasingly complex as new products and capabilities come on-stream. Valentin Richter will describe key issues for comparing and evaluating enterprise search products, including features, architecture, integration with existing IT infrastructures, and management. Based on hands-on experience with multiple leading search vendors, he will illustrate the decision process and show how these vendor products compare in real-world projects. 

Why is the task of searching for the right enterprise search solution more difficult than just continuing to search for information without one? It’s not only a minefield of terminology, but the vendors often seem to make it deliberately hard with vague language and confusing claims. Gareth Lodge speaks about Voca’s selection process and how it was run to ensure that it was driven by the user requirements rather than those of the techies or the vendors and their sales techniques. He offers insights to future purchasers on the lessons learned and suggestions to the vendors on how to win sales.

Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of various search engine solutions and their suitability for different uses, and get a profile of the confusing and rapidly changing search engine landscape, based on Steve Arnold’s recent critical study of enterprise search systems. Arnold will identify best-of-breed search solutions and outline a practical list of product selection checkpoints for large and small organizations.

This intense day of conference sessions may have generated as many questions as it did answers. Here’s a chance to query the experts and get their thinking on topics that came up in the sessions or that you are eager to have answered during the conference.