Social tools are changing our world and our enterprises. It is amazing how much and how quickly information is added by the community when it is relevant. How do organizations take advantage of this to enhance their information and knowledge flows, improve productivity, and streamline the enterprise? Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy,” focuses on the huge untapped potential for social tools with discussions about making it easier for enterprise social tool adoption, tagging, getting tools to mesh, modifying Web 2.0 approaches for the enterprise, interface/interaction design for ease of use, sociality, and encouragement of use. He highlights interesting examples of organizations using social tools to enhance their knowledge enterprise. While social tools and services that make up Enterprise 2.0 provide a foundation for enterprises, Vander Wal points to some challenges and possible solutions. Filled with ideas and insights you can use in your organization.

Opinions about the value of federated search vary widely. Some view it as the optimal way to discover unified content. Others believe it to be a slow and poor substitute for searching the underlying sources. Some see it as a necessary evil and learn to tolerate it within their organizations. Come listen to our three panelists discuss their experience with numerous federated search deployments. Learn about the benefits federated search can offer as well as its shortcomings and common pitfalls. Walk away knowing if federated search is right for your organization and how to get from a blank search screen to one that delivers the results your users need.

Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two different models of social search should be incorporated into enterprise and conventional search systems today. Collective Search involves aggregating social metadata, trends, and previous tags, bookmarks, or information shared by social networks. Collaborative Search, or question-answering, occurs when two or more participants actively engage in an information seeking task. Interactions include everything from replying to a one-time question to dually negotiating the query formation and relevancy of specific results to arrive at a shared consensus of best fit. This talk will frame the relevant models of social search in the context of Brynn’s research, and discuss the potential benefits for both users as well as organizations. We will extend these trends and findings to concrete design considerations that we encourage system designers to consider in order to leverage social search capabilities within the enterprise.