Most organizations underestimate the human dimension, either in understanding why and how employees search or ensuring that the search team has the right skills and resources. Based on more than 30 years’ experience of search management, Martin White, author of Making Search Work, will present a set of 10 critical success factors for effective search implementations, linking these to topics covered by the Enterprise Search Summit program. The core message of this keynote will be that technology alone is not enough to make for effective search.

Social search seeks to add a human element to the search equation, recognizing the rise of a participatory culture and the prominence of Web 2.0 technologies.  In its ideal form, social search enables searchers to factor their own knowledge, opinions, and experiences into search results. But does social search always work seamlessly? And even when it does, is it appropriate in the enterprise? Moderator Jean Graef will lead an insightful discussion among a panel of social search pioneers as they attempt to answer these and other questions about this emerging search alternative.

Organizations today recognize that information management in the enterprise should take an integrated approach. The convergence of business intelligence, enterprise search, CRM, and CM tools points to the reality of this notion. Increasingly, however, search tools are encroaching on the BI sector, with some suggesting that a pure-play BI tool isn’t required to obtain competitive, customer, and analytic insights. Join search industry watchdog Stephen Arnold as he examines various approaches to achieving actionable business intelligence in the enterprise.

This session will address the state of enterprise search in practice, based on the results of Jane McConnell’s second annual Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey. Created from data and anecdotes gained from 178 intranet managers in organizations worldwide, the survey analyzes the state of affairs in the search arena. In order to provide practical take-away, these results will be applied to three classes of organizations: those with intranets that are well-established, those that have an intranet in place but have planned significant improvements, and those where an intranet has just been launched or has a long way to go to become a well-leveraged enterprise tool.

Finding the right information among the many kinds of unstructured content and structured data in an enterprise is challenging. The challenges increase with the requirement to find the most relevant information in the context of business processes, and are compounded by the need for security based on the information itself and the role of the person searching for it. This presentation describes how Oracle is addressing these challenges to enable all enterprise users to access the information they need with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search.

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 presentation, based on a series of ongoing search and categorization projects, will present the issues that were faced while developing a range of taxonomies with associated categorization rules. The approach included a team of editors, software developers, taxonomists, and categorization software. Multiple taxonomies were used, each of which was the basis for the creation of a series of aggregation-based publications. Tom Reamy will discuss the real work involved as well as its value and future applications.

The benefit of integrating taxonomies with search is too great to dismiss just because you lack a taxonomist on staff. Taxonomies not only aid search but also enable discovery. Well-designed base taxonomies that serve as examples, an easy-to-use interface, auto-categorization based on algorithms instead of taxonomist-created rules, and sufficient documentation and training can enable select nontaxonomists in your organization to maintain and grow your taxonomies.

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.

Enterprise search has become the standard for helping to make organizations’ information retrieval processes more efficient. Improving user access to data across the enterprise is key. But effective search can do so much more than just improve existing business processes—it can transform your business network by exposing otherwise hidden expertise, customer relationships, and crossselling opportunities. In this session, Oz Benamram, demonstrates how to transform your business development process with enterprise search by automatically sharing relationship connections and context throughout the enterprise and provide the benefits of a contextual, searchable network to your stakeholders to achieve maximum adoption and effectiveness.

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.

As in many modern IT disciplines, enterprise search has a community of open source tools seething under the surface, gaining momentum and street cred. Apache Lucene, the open source search kernel, has been around for quite a while. But Lucene is a low-level library, hardly suitable out of the box for enterprise deployment. Enter Solr, a subproject and superset of Lucene that provides a hip RESTful interface and a true schema on top of the already excellent Lucene core. This presentation will provide an overview of open source search technologies and give some of the trade-offs when selecting open source search software versus commercial search software.

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.