Tuesday May 20, 2008

This session will provide an overview of the enterprise search engine marketplace. Veteran search consultant Erik Arnold will define  and describe the main categories in the space, as well as the noteworthy vendors, key differentiators, and highlight some new approaches. He will provide a framework on which attendees can best build a successful search solution process.

Are you using the search analytics portion of your search engine to the fullest?  Do you understand your top queries reports? Search should be a conversation with your customers. Are you listening? It’s all right there in your activity reports. This talk takes a look at the reports you should be monitoring and what each of them can tell you about your customer, your website, and your company.

This session will focus on the findings of The Sedona Conference Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery, including a discussion of how lawyers search for information in ediscovery today and how the profession (bench and bar alike) is waking up to using alternative forms of e-discovery search methods beyond reliance on keywords alone. Hear a variety of perspectives on how corporate clients can be on the forefront of designing a better overall process for searching for relevant documents in e-discovery.

Do companies really know what turns up when an employee types “confidential” into their intranet or portal search box? The proliferation and increasing power of enterprise search requires companies to pay more attention than ever before to protect confidential information. Today, companies must carefully reconsider document and information security issues, whether to protect intellectual property rights, undisclosed strategies, and employee privacy for personal information such as medical, retirement, and personnel data.

For the past 2 years, an international research project, known as the TREC Legal Track, has been conducted under the auspices of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, aimed at evaluating how alternative search methods compare with Boolean methods in finding relevant documents in a legal context. Hear the latest surprising findings from the second year of the track on how various search methods matched up and what the research means both for lawyers and their corporate clients.

When searching for critical business information, the info-glut users’ experience with traditional search engines can be more of an obstacle than an advantage. In this session, Greg Merkle will discuss how Dow Jones Factiva has leveraged FAST search technologies to help users get relevant information for their specific roles within the organization and achieve intelligent navigation. On the forefront of new analysis techniques, text mining and discovery have become a powerful way to uncover the changing business issues and discover the emerging trends that will drive business now and into the future.

E-discovery projects require a sophisticated, flexible, and intuitive technology component to realize a successful outcome. This presentation will illustrate how specific project requirements create specific certain technology needs. Jeff Flax will present a use-case scenario that required a costeffective, easy-to-implement discovery solution. He will discuss how he found that his needs would best be met with an enterprise search engine as opposed to an e-discovery-specific platform. Attendees will learn the differences between these two types of technologies and will be able to identify which will best suit their individual needs.

Verizon wanted to relieve staff from routine research in order to free them up to focus on higher-value research activities. The company worked to provide seamless access from the Verizon corporate intranet to superior business content that is available via open web searches. By distributing access to Northern Light’s SinglePoint application broadly throughout the company, Verizon was able to create a self-service environment for research. This case study will include a comparison to Verizon’s previous system for managing market research as well as discussion of the value of the time savings in accessing information.

Once everyone has a text search engine for their enterprise, then what?  Where are search and text analytics technology headed?  Whether you care about legal discovery, regulatory compliance, or just improving the way your intranet serves your employees, the text revolution is coming. Find out how semantic search can go far beyond today’s keyword search to truly  uncover the meaning behind the words. How will content management and business intelligence be affected? Learn how personalization will provide a new level of relevance in every employee’s business day. Search 2.0 is coming. Are you ready?

There are two different worlds in the search community. One, largely consisting of business people and IT professionals, focuses on how to generate, distribute and use information within an instituion. The second, largely comprised of lawyers and risk managers, worry about the implications of this mass of information, in the discovery processes that are increasingly common in litigation and regulatory inquiries. This session describes these two world views, and suggests some ways in which a more unified approach can be developed, to the general benefit of business insitutions.