Archive for the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ Category

Tobias Larsson Hult

Real time search in the Enterprise

maj 10 - 2010 | Tobias Larsson Hult

Real time search is a big fuzz in the global network called Internet. Major search engines like Google and Bing are now providing users with real time search results from Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and other social media sites. Real time search means that as soon as content are created or updated, it is immediately searchable. This might be obvious and seems like a basic requirement, but working with search you know that this is not the case most of the time. Looking inside the firewall, in the enterprise, I dare to say that real time search is far from common. Sometimes content is not changed very frequently so it is not necessary to make it instantly searchable. Though, in many cases it’s the technical architecture that limits a real time search implementation.

The most common way of indexing content is by using a web crawler or a connector. Either way, you schedule them to go out and fetch new/updated/deleted content at specific interval during the day. This is the basic architecture for search platforms these days. The advantage of this approach is that the content systems does not need to adapt to the search platform, they just deliver content through their ordinary API:s during indexing. The drawback is that new or updated content is not available until next scheduled indexing. Depending on the system this might take several hours. Due to several reasons, mostly performance, you do not want to schedule connectors or web crawlers to fetch content too often. Instead, to provide real time search you have to do the other way around; let the content system push content to the search platform.

Most systems have some sort of event system that triggers an event when content is created/updated/deleted. Listening for these events, the system can send the content to the search platform at the same time it’s stored in the content system. The search platform can immediately index the pushed content and make it searchable. This requires adaptation of the content system towards the search platform. In this case though, I think the advantages outweighs the disadvantages. Modern content systems of today are (or should be) providing a plug-in architecture so you should fairly easy be able to plug in this kind of code. These plugins could also be provided by the search platform vendors just as ordinary connectors are provided today.

Do you agree, or have I been living in a cave for the past years? I’d love to hear you comments on this subject!

Christopher Wallstrom

Enterprise Search 2.0?

november 30 - 2009 | Christopher Wallstrom

While visiting Enterprise Search Summit in San Jose I realized that enabling Enterprise 2.0 within enterprise search is the hottest trend at the moment.

Andrew McAfee who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has released a book on the subject, spoke about how to use altruism to develop the enterprise. People are wired to help and if we stop obsessing about the risks and lower the bars for how people can help each other it is possible to make this work within a corporate environment.

He also spoke about how process control and how much workflow control. How much do we really need? Make it easy to correct mistake instead of making it hard to make them. With regards to innovation he pointed out that we need to question credentialism and build communities that people want to join. To leverage the intelligence aspects within the enterprise we should explore and experiment with collective intelligence such as prediction markets and open peer review processes. All in all make it easy for people to interconnect.

Very high improvement in access to knowledge, internal experts, satisfaction, increased innovation and customer satisfaction.

I also recommend to read Price Waterhouse Coopers Technology Forecast Summer 2008 to get a good overview of the available tools and technologies.

So how does this impact enterprise search? Search can be made to be the facilitator for Enterprise 2.0. Of course it is possible to index and make all blogs, wikipedias, tweets (yammer), online communities and social networks searchable, but that is only one way to make it this new environment more findable. If someone tweets or blogs about information we should use that information to impact on the search results and ranking. We could also track user behavior on a site to make certain information more visible with regards to implicitly expressed interests.

Tobias Larsson Hult

Google Search Appliance learns what you want to find

november 3 - 2009 | Tobias Larsson Hult

Analyzing user behaviour is a key ingredient to make a search solutions successfull. By using Search Analytics, you gain knowledge of how your users use the search solution and what they expect to find. With this knowledge, simple adjustments such as KeyMatches, Synonyms and Query Suggestion can enhance the findability of your search solution.

In addition to this, you can also tune the relevancy by knowing what your users are after. An exciting field in this area is to automate this task, i.e by analyzing what users click on in the search result, the relevancy of the documents it automatically adjusted. Findwise has been looking into this area lately, but there hasn’t been any out-of-the-box functionality for this from any vendor.

Until now.

Two weeks ago Google announced the second major upgrade this year for the Google Search Appliance. Labeled as version 6.2, it brings a lot of new features. The most interesting and innovative one is the Self-Learning Scorer. The self learning scorer analyzes user’s click and behaviour in the search result and use it as input to adjust the relevancy. This means that if a lot of people clicks on the third result, the GSA will boost this document to appear higher up in the result set. So, without you having to do anything, the relevance will increase over time making your Search Solution perform better the more it is used. It’s easy to imagine this will create an upward spiral.

The 6.2 release also delivers improvements regarding security, connectivity, indexing overview and more. To read more about the release, head over to the Google Enterprise Blog.

Maria Johansson

Internet life in the future

oktober 1 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

I always think it’s nice when I hear people talking about the same things that are on my mind these days. It makes me reflect upon things in new ways and also makes me realize that I’m on to something. I attended a presentation by Björn Jeffery from Good Old (hosted by Västra Götalands Regionen). His talk on internet strategy was interesting and had many things in common with the keynote by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo) that I recently heard at the HCI2007 conference. Two things interested me most; the future of mobility and the inevitable question of integrity. So here are my thoughts today, on internet strategy and the future of internet usage.

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Maria Johansson

Usability 2.0

september 3 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

A lot is happening in the world of enterprise search. Recent blog posts include discussions of how enterprise 2.0 tools can be integrated into corporate systems; see discussions of taxonomies or integration on Social Glass for example. Or take a look at Bill Ives examples of people who achieved success with E 2.0, on the FAST Forward blog.

These new trends are also starting to affect how we talk about usability. A couple of months ago there was a seminar about how web 2.0 technology have consequences for usability. (Watch the video from the seminar Usability 2.0.)

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Caroline Abrahamsson

The flexibility of internet search

augusti 12 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The expression ”have you googled it?” meaning ”have you search for it on the internet?” shows what an impact the worlds most valuable brand has made on people.

However, new development has provided several new and flexible ways of using search. The traditional way of searching often helps you find specific information that you know exist (presented in endless hit lists). Another approach is to let search help you find the things you didn’t know existed, but most likely help you put things into new perspectives.

One example is the recommended search solutions, such as music map or live plasma, which finds music or movies that are related to your search term and that you most likely will appreciate. Another example is what to rent that, by using different people’s preferences and searches, can recommend a good movie for your weekend. (Läs mer…)

Maria Johansson

A Change of Focus; or Control vs Openness part two

juli 28 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

A lot of the people I meet in my work use these new web 2.0 tools daily. They ask me why metadata and taxonomies have to be so complicated when you can do ”that web 2.0 stuff” with tagging. They say they prefer “the easy way” and prefer folksonomies over structures; they don’t think they can trust the structures anyway. People, who would like to work in an organization like Charlies.

Traditionally intranets are about control; we want to control what information people get and when and how they get it, instead of trying to make sure that people have the information they need when they need it.
I did some sketches for a search driven portal the other day. One of the comments I got was: ”Wow! Why can’t we do that?”

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Wisdom comes with knowledge – let's have it at your fingertips

juli 23 - 2007 | Bengt Rodung

Wisdom comes with knowledge – this is our payoff, a generic statement, easy to agree with. But what do we mean with these few words….

The management guru Peter Drucker (www.peter-drucker.com) stated already 2001 that the next society will be a “knowledge society”. Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce. Its three main characteristics will be:

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Maria Johansson

The right information at the right time; or Control vs Openness

juli 13 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

There is obviously a difference between what people want and do and what the organisations think and want to do.
I saw a good definition of what enterprise 2.0 is the other day. Meet Charlie is a good example of how web 2.0 tools can be used in the enterprise area. Because people do use them; these new tools have changed the way we communicate and collaborate. If your not an organization that is.

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Using search for web and enterprise 2.0? Plan for the future!

juni 21 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Buzzwords such as ‘the long tail’, ‘user generated content’ and ‘web 2.0′ has been around for some time now, but does it automatically mean that everyone understands the way that technology is heading? (Läs mer…)