To make search an effective decision-making tool, your search engine needs to intelligently deliver information from both static content and dynamic business applications. From inventory levels to sales opportunities and product defects, constantly changing information in business applications (i.e., CRM, ERP, BI) are critical information sources. This session addresses the integration and indexing challenges of dynamic business applications, how to present information from multiple sources in a user-friendly way that takes advantage of rich presentation possibilities, and how to ensure the security of business application data.

The session explores the use of desktop search in the enterprise, including tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, X1, Copernic, Autonomy, ISYS, and others. From productivity gains to compliance issues, enterprise desktop search tools can assist in finding e-mails, documents, and other useful information on the desktop and in e-mail file servers. Learn about enterprise desktop search tool policies and best practices and why they are needed. Hear how to integrate desktop search tools with enterprise search, what works with what, and how to include search in the enterprise workflow.

It is not just enough to deploy your search capability and add a taxonomy or integrate it with your content management system, if your end users are still not finding what they want. Tuning or enhancing search is an arduous process, but some best practices are rapidly emerging. Avi Rappoport and the case studies she describes offer powerful examples of how search logs, metrics, and analytics can open a window into user behavior and allow you to improve search to meet user expectations.

Search engines may uncover flaws in existing security frameworks and expose either restricted content itself or verify the existence of hidden information to unauthorized users.  This session addresses security requirements for an enterprise search solution.  Search engine security is a form of access control restricted to the context of a search application, ensuring that users can only access information they are permitted to see.  Vivísimo will outline its work in developing an application that searches content across a record management system, email archives and file servers for a large insurance provider currently under litigation.

Hear how AT Kearney used search technology as the foundation for an entire knowledge management system in an organization where building and managing intellectual capital is mission-critical. The result, called @Knowledge, has become a must-go daily destination for all AT Kearney consultants. Gain insights into the selection process, including decisions about search versus document management, key criteria in selecting a vendor, and the deployment process and pitfalls.

You are a believer, but do others on your project think the same way? How can you get support for your search and taxonomy efforts before you are able to demonstrate their value in real-world applications? Learn some educational strategies that are critical to successful taxonomy and search integration and hear practical insights on how to speak your audience's language to get the buy-in you need from your clients, management, and other project stakeholders.

Learn about a methodology used over the past 4 years to improve the user search experience at IRS.gov. The approach focuses on understanding users' information-seeking problems and who has the problems, and then applying appropriate solutions. Information is gathered through ongoing analysis of site usage reports, satisfaction surveys, and help desk reports, plus a working relationship with the content owners. Hear about resulting improvements in user satisfaction scores and decreases in contacts with the help desk.

The rapid emergence of user tagging has generated interest in folksonomies for knowledge management within the enterprise due to its potential positive impact on the cost and quality of human-generated metadata. This interest occurs in the context of varying levels of commitment to more traditional methods using controlled vocabularies, corporate taxonomies, and/or automated metadata generation, all of which have met with varying degrees of success in implementation. Brad Allen discusses work on systems and business processes that attempt to achieve the cost and usability benefits of folksonomic approaches and the precision of taxonomic and/or ontological approaches.

Since 2004, venture capitalists have poured more than $350 million into almost 80 Internet search startups. Many are convinced they can become the next Google of consumer search, or that they can challenge the leaders in the enterprise and site search space. Hear directly from several of these “upstarts,” and get an inside glimpse how they are pushing into the next generation of search technology.

Enterprise search is emerging as a new platform for application development, often replacing traditional legacy client/server applications and Java intranet navigation portals. Hear how some organizations are getting ROI from enterprise search by building complex metadata-driven, applications-leveraging enterprise search services. See examples including multiple data source integration (RDBMS, WWW, Search Engines), metadata extraction, taxonomy and workflow integration.

The Enterprise Search Showcase features tabletop displays and demonstrations by 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.

Search is no longer just an application for finding information. It is a key process for supporting actions within any organization. The shift to information overflow requires us to exercise attention management to help our users and clients put relevant information into focus and then help them transform that relevant information into actionable answers. The next generation of search solutions will produce a more efficient process to support the evolution from browsing to searching to finding to knowing.

This forward-thinking keynote discusses what to expect from the next generation of search, including:

• Improved speed and ease of locating relevant answers and proactive alerts to users
• Increased scope of search, including unstructured media, and audio and video formats for business intelligence
• Presentation of two-dimensional information as multidimensional knowledge, providing navigation and visualization of information in context
• Leveraging technology and workflows to eliminate inefficient processes, automating the profiling process
• Integration of collaborative Web 2.0 concepts, adopting social networks, wikis, tagging, notifications, and mashups

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.

ENI, one of the largest oil companies in the world, describes how people in the field of R&D and technology management leverage the advantages of semantic search. This session demonstrates how ENI uses semantic technologies to: 1) improve precision and effectiveness in searching, selecting and tracking information; 2) enable implementation of search strategies mimicking mental processes of researchers and technology specialists; 3) automatically organize the company's knowledge assets in relevant taxonomies, ensuring security and compliance, and fostering knowledge sharing and cooperation; 4) implement a high-productivity monitoring process of internal and open-source information, suitable for deep exploration of repositories to identify hidden relations among concepts.

Concept searching, using latent semantic indexing (LSI) techniques, enables searchers to find more information. Rather than simply returning results containing specific keywords, LSI engines return results that are conceptually related to a search phrase, paragraph, or entire document. The LSI process includes a unique method of content classification based upon multidimensional vector spaces. These results can be even more compelling because LSI methods allow rapid integration of dissimilar date types with minimal coding or data preparation. Specific examples shown in this session include concept searching on patents and in premium business periodicals.

Product search illustrates a number of search techniques that can be used to create innovative search solutions. This includes integration of structured and unstructured search, entitiy extraction, metadata mapping across systems, federated search, faceted result filtering, problems of embedded data, and varying unstructured information formats. This session examines each of these approaches, provides lessons for tackling complex search challenges, and discusses implicit versus explicit metadata and retaining search context as metadata.

Faceted navigation is a powerful new approach that combines the best of search and browse, but, to date, most faceted navigation applications have been developed for e-commerce sites that deal in “things,” from wine to computers to hardware. The world inside the firewall is very different in the focus of an application and the concentration on documents rather than things and poses special challenges for developing a faceted navigation application for the enterprise. This session looks at an ECM project that applied a faceted approach to organizing enterprise content and the design and development issues. These included the initial design of the facets, which facets to include, what facet structures were needed to support multidimensional filtering, how to integrate taxonomies and facets, and how to design the best user interface for an application that included search, subject taxonomies, and facets.

The Enterprise Search Showcase features tabletop displays and demonstrations by 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.

In this endnote session, Steve Arnold will discuss the hot topic of whether text mining can save enterprise search, and comment on the principal themes of this year's conference, including the platform strategies of Autonomy, Endeca, and Fast Search & Transfer; the rapid shift from "findability" to the higher value concept "business intelligence"; and the increasing presence of Google and its Googleplex technology. Following his comments, the panelists will offer rebuttals and their views of these and related issues.