Enterprise Search and Beyond –Part 2

Going beyond theory from the part 1 of this blog, there are some additional points that compel an Enterprise Search Strategy.
1) People to Search in an Enterprise for effective collaboration and avoid communication via distribution lists. Searching through address books of employees in an Enterprise is a time consuming activity. Share Point recently added people search as a feature
2) Feed data from a variety of internal and external repositories including share point farms, internal and external Web servers, Exchange public folders, line-of-business data, file shares, third party data and formats not limited to the following structured, semi-structured and un-structured data
a) Email and RSS feeds
b) News letters
c) Word, PDF, Spreadsheets, XML and Multimedia etc…
d) Wikis
e) Corporate Relational Databases
f) Knowledge Management Systems
g) Archives
h) Internet Data that was indexed for current business needs

Open ended Challenges and Opportunities
1) A rate card for a consulting Enterprise is confidential information and a business process to communicate the request to the search user’s manager or something to this extent
2) Access Control Lists as a security requirement may cause frustration for the employee due to data bureaucracy
3) Re-directing users to a different site [competitors] if unable to provide results. While this may sound very ethical, it may have other ramifications
4) Behavioral aspects on adoption of Enterprise Search as a part of an Information Workers daily routine will need to be evaluated by the next generation of Enterprise Search Technologies to improvise on existing strategies

Some Best Practices
'In the AMOEBA like image'. Click to see an enlarged image

The future of Enterprise Search
o Dynamic or Realtime search. If there are updates to the content, re-process and need for re-indexing real time shall drive this aspect. Federated Search principles may still be applicable. A recent webinar from Coveo that I attended has more insights on this
o Interface changes like Surface, Kiosks, need to be accommodated in the Search strategy from a UI perspective. A hospital using kiosk with SEARCH feature for all the medical staff on the floor
o Audio and Video Search
o Searching across individual desktops in an Enterprise This would mean, your shared desktop is crawled during the off-peak hours and documents indexed consequently making them searchable
o A new Enterprise that has not yet accumulated enough data in their data repositories might need access to Internet data specifically indexed for their business needs instead of entire universe of data
I would like to conclude that there are more interesting topics being discussed within ‘Enterprise Search Engine Professionals’ group on LinkedIn from where some of the discussion points on ESP have been incorporated into this blog.