Archive for the ‘Intranet’ Category

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Ludvig Johansson

Contributor vs. Consumer

October 25 - 2011 | Ludvig Johansson

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011, Anaheim USA. This turned out to be an intense four-day conference covering just about any SharePoint 2010 topic you can imagine – from the geekiest developer session to business tracks with lessons learned.

To me, one of the most memorable sessions where Social Search with Dan Benson and Paul Summers, in which they showed us how social behaviours can be used to influence the current rank of search. For instance, users interests entered in MySite can be used to boost (xrank) search results accordingly. This was an eye opener as it illustrated what’s possible with quite easy means. Thanks for that!

Another great session was Scott Jamison talking about Findability in SharePoint. The key ingredient in this session was to differentiate between contributor and consumer. Typically we focus on the contributor, building 100 level folder structures with names that make sense to contributor. However, we seem to forget about the consumers, who of course are the other key aspect of an intranet. It is equally important to create a good support system for contributors, as it is to focus on consumer needs. As Jamison said “why have folders for both contributors and consumers? ”. SharePoint includes endless possibilities when it comes to creating logical views built on search, tags and filtering aimed to fill the needs of the consumers.

So, keep the folders or what ever support the contributor needs, but let your imagination float free for delivering best class Findability to the consumer!

Lina Westerling

Snapshots of a User Experience course

July 7 - 2011 | Lina Westerling

In April I attended the UX Intensive course in Amsterdam, hosted by experience design firm Adaptive Path.

One thing I found interesting was the variations of participants’ work focus over the product development process. Some specialize in doing user research whereas others, myself included, cover the whole process from high-level strategy to detailed interaction design.

Looking back on the four intensive days, mixing lectures and hands-on exercises, there are some thoughts I would like to share with you, sticking to topics applicable when developing intranet and company public websites.

 

Nothing exists in isolation

“Design a thing by considering it in its next largest context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, environment in a city plan”

Eliel Saarinen – Finnish architect (1873-1950)

This quote came up in the course when covering design strategy. An architect originally stated it, but it can be applied to all design areas, including websites and digital applications.

For instance, lets look at an intranet: it is definitely not used in isolation. It is part of a workflow involving several IT systems and other information channels such as face-to-face meetings. Looking only at Findwise area of expertise: the search function is undeniably an essential part of the website.

Typically, search tries to replicate/mirror the navigational structure of a site. This is reasonable, and good, but surely this relation could go the other way as well – navigation can learn from the dynamics of search and from user search behavior. Navigation and search should be intertwined, rather than being two separate ways of accessing information. Studies show that users are not either searchers or navigators; sometimes users are biased to search and sometimes to click menu items and links. Most of the times users actually combine the two methods when visiting a website. This should be considered when developing a new website – search and the rest of the site should not be developed separately.

Moreover, internal platforms for spreading information and collaboration are typically used in different contexts by different users. An example: The developer use it to up- and download day-to-day work documents whereas the general user mainly view it as a news channel to keep up to date with what is going on in the organization. Yet editors use it to publish information for other employees to access.

In large organizations, applications used by employees are typically owned by different units – units that do not talk to each other. I am convinced that all system owners within an organization have things to learn form each other. After all, they are often serving the same people and might otherwise redo work such as target group analysis. All parts will gain from communicating more across organizational borders.

Maria Johansson

Bridging the gap between people and technology

December 6 - 2010 | Maria Johansson

Tony Russell-Rose recently wrote about the changing face of search, a post that summed up the discussion about the future of search that took part at the recent search solutions conference. This is indeed an interesting topic. My colleague Ludvig also touched on this topic in his recent post where he expressed his disappointment in the lack of visionary presentations at this year’s KMWorld conference.

At our last monthly staff meeting we had a visit from Dick Stenmark, associate professor of Informatics at the Department of Applied IT at Gothenburg University. He spoke about his view on the intranets of the future. One of the things he talked about was the big gap in between the user’s vague representation of her information need (e.g. the search query) and the representation of the documents indexed by the intranet search engine. If a user has a hard time defining what it is she is looking for it will of course be very hard for the search engine to interpret the query and deliver relevant results. What is needed, according to Dick Stenmark, is a way to bridge the gap between technology (the search engine) and people (the users of the search engine).

As I see it there are two ways you can bridge this gap:

  1. Help users become better searchers
  2. Customize search solutions to fit the needs of different user groups

Helping users become better searchers

I have mentioned this topic in one of my earlier posts. Users are not good at describing which information they are seeking, so it is important that we make sure the search solutions help them do so. Already existing functionalities, such as query completion and related searches, can help users create and use better queries.

Query completion often includes common search terms, but what if we did combine them with the search terms we would have wanted them to search for? This requires that you learn something about your users and their information needs. If you do take the time to learn about this it is possible to create suggestions that will help the user not only spell correctly, but also to create a more specific query. Some search solutions (such as homedepot.com) also uses a sort of query disambiguation, where the user’s search returns not only results, but a list of matching categories (where the user is asked to choose which category of products her search term belongs). This helps the search engine return not only the correct set of results, but also display the most relevant set of facets for that product category. Likewise, Google displays a list of related searches at the bottom of the search results list.

These are some examples of functionalities that can help users become better searchers. If you want to learn some more have a look at Dan Russells presentation linked from my previous post.

Customize search solutions to fit the needs of different user groups

One of the things Dick Stenmark talked about in his presentation for us at Findwise was how different users’ behavior is when it comes to searching for information. Users both have different information needs and also different ways of searching for information. However, when it comes to designing the experience of finding information most companies still try to achieve a one size fits all solution. A public website can maybe get by supporting 90% of its visitors but an intranet that only supports part of the employees is a failure. Still very few companies work with personalizing the search applications for their different user groups. (Some don’t even seem to care that they have different user groups and therefore treat all their users as one and the same.) The search engine needs to know and care more about its’ users in order to deliver better results and a better search experience as a whole. For search to be really useful personalization in some form is a must, and I think and hope we will see more of this in the future.

Caroline Abrahamsson

OmniFind Enterprise Edition 9.1 – new capabilities discussed over breakfast

November 28 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

During the last year a number of interesting things has happened to IBM’s search platform and the new version, OmniFind 9.1, was released this summer. Apart from a large number of improvements in the interface, the change to basing the new solution on open source (Lucene) has proven to be a genius by-pass of some of OmniFinds previous shortcomings.

The licensing model is still quite complicated, something Stephen E Arnold highlighted earlier this year.
Since a number of our customers have chosen to take a closer look at OmniFind 9.1 as a search solution we decided to host a breakfast seminar together with IBM last Thursday, in order to discuss the new features and show how some of our customer are working with it.

Without a doubt, the most interesting part is always to discuss how the solution can be utilized for intranets, extranets, external sites and e-business purposes.

Apart from this, we also took a look at some of the new features:
Type ahead (query suggestion), based on either search statistics or indexed content

Type ahead

 

 

Faceted searchi.e. the ability to filter on dates, locations, format etc as well as numeric and date range. The later is of course widely used within e-business.

Facets for e-business

 

 

Thumbnail views of documents (yes, exactly what it sounds like: a thumbnail view for first page of documents in results page)

Thumbnail of a document

Search analytics in OmniFind 9.1 holds a number of interesting statistic capabilities. Some things worth mentioning is number of queries, query popularity, number of users, average response time (ms) and worst response time (ms).

Save searches (to be able to go back and see if new information has been included), search within result sets (to further narrow your result set within a given result set) and did-you-mean functionality (spell checking) are also included.

..and improvements on the administrator side, just to mention a few:
Ability to change the relevancy i.e. to adjust and give certain types of information higher ranking
Support for incremental indexing i.e. to only re-index the information that is new or changed since the last time you made it searchable.

To conclude: IBM is making a whole lot of improvements in the new version, which are worth taking a closer look at. During the spring we are running upgrading projects for some of our customers, and we will keep you up-to-date with the different application areas OmniFind Enterprise Edition 9.1 is being used for. Please let us know if you have any particular questions or have areas that you are interested in.

Maria Johansson

Metadata in focus for our Findability solution

October 28 - 2010 | Maria Johansson

Last week Kristian Norling wrote a blog post about how they work with metadata at Västra Götalands Regionen (VGR). In the beginning of his post he states that metadata is boring, but extremely useful. A teacher in statistics that I had in college used to say that statistics is the most boring thing there is. It’s the things that you can do with statistics that makes it really interesting. So I agree with both of them, the metadata (or statistics) in itself is quite boring, but the things you can do with it is what makes it all worth it. The quality and structure of information must also be in focus when creating Findability solutions that aim to provide easy access to all information inside and outside the firewall.

Findwise is currently working on improving our findability solution which is our intranet. When we investigated our own business and user needs we learned that there is a need for a more flexible way of organizing information so it can be found from different entrypoints as well as in different contexts. Therefore one of the things at the heart of our intranet (except the search functionality off course) is metadata. As a fast growing  (and changing) company we find it hard to create and maintain one single information hierarchy that is intuitive and self-evident to all our employees.  Instead we are working with a taxonomy with a simple set of categories and concepts. All content is tagged with what, where and who.

Who describes which people or groups are allowed to see a document. It can be everyone, a single person or a group of people such as the finance department, or a project team. Since knowledge sharing is very important for our organization most of the information is open for everyone to see and use.

Where describes which sites the content should be visible on. A single document can be visible on several sites. So if contact details for a customer is relevant to show on several projects for that customer the same content can be displayed on all the different project sites, without us having to store duplicate versions of the content.

What describes the concepts the content relates to. These concepts include customers, projects, products & competences, information types as well as categories that are created through the means of user generated tagging. This way one single document does not have to belong to one specific site or folder, but can be displayed in several different and all relevant locations on the intranet. Thanks to this use of metadata it is also possible to use the different categories for search and faceted navigation. For example I can view all design specifications from different customer projects that include the concept faceted navigation, or all information about how to work with search analytics with the search platform Autonomy IDOL. The concepts and the information becomes the focus instead of the location where it is stored.

In the first stage this will be done manually as content is added to the intranet. In the future it would also be of interest for us to utilize the same type of service that we developed for VGR, for our own content. But instead of using controlled vocabularies such as MeSH we use our own taxonomy and the power of search technology to suggest or automatically add appropriate customers, projects and categories for a document. A first step in this will probably be to use entity extraction techniques to identify and automatically tag already existing documents with concepts such as customers and search platforms.

We hope to share our experiences from this project with you in the future. In the mean while I recommend that you read Kristian’s post about how they use different types of keyword metadata at VGR.

Caroline Abrahamsson

Information flow in VGR

October 17 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The previous week Kristian Norling from VGR (Västra Götaland Regional Council) posted a really interesting and important blog post about information flow.
Those of you who doesn’t know what VGR has been up to previously, here is a short background.

For a number of years the organization has been working to give reality to a model for how information is created, managed, stored and distributed. And perhaps the most important part – integrated.

Information flow in VGR

So, why is this important?
In order to give your users access to the right information it is essential to get control of the whole information flow i.e. from the time it is created until it reaches the end user. If we lack knowledge about this, it is almost impossible to ensure quality and accuracy.

The fact that we have control also gives us endless possibilities when it comes to distributing the right information at the right time (an old cliché that is finally becoming reality). To sum up: that is what search is all about!

When information is being created VGR uses a Metadata service which helps the editors to tag their content by giving keyword suggestions.
In reality this means that the information can be distributed in the way it is intended. News are for example tagged with subject, target group and organizational info (apart from dates, author, expiring date etc which is automated) – meaning that the people belonging to specific groups with certain roles will get the news that are important to them.

Once the information is tagged correctly and published it is indexed by search. This is done in a number of different ways: by HTML-crawling, through RSS, by feeding the search engine or through direct indexing.

The information is after this available through search and ready to be distributed to the right target groups.
Portlets are used to give single sign-on access to a number of information systems and template pages in the WCM (Web Content Management system) uses search alerts to give updated information.
Simply put: a search alert for e.g. meeting minutes that contains your department’s name will give you an overview of all information that concerns this when it is published, regardless of in which system it resides.

Furthermore, the blog post describes VGRs work with creating short and persistent URL:s (through an URL-service) and how to ”monitor” and “listen to” the information flow (for real-time indexing and distribution) – areas where we all have things to learn.
Over time Kristian will describe the different parts of the model in detail, be sure to keep an eye on the blog.

What are your thoughts on how to get control of the information flow? Have you been developing similar solutions for part of this?

Caroline Abrahamsson

Search as an integrator of social intranets

September 12 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Wikis, blogs, microblogging, commenting, rating…we all know the buzzwords around the “Social intranet” by know.
If the first trend was about getting people to use the new technology, the second seems to be about making sense of all the information that has been created by now.

I sat down with a number of our customers the other week to talk about intranets and internal portals and everyone seemed to face one particular challenge: making sense of the collaborative and social content. How do we make this sort of information searchable without losing the context?  And how do we know who the sender is? (more…)

Caroline Abrahamsson

“If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive” (how to create a knowledge sharing intranet)

August 29 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The quote is a statement from the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Lew Platt and summarizes this week’s conference “Sociala intranät” (Social intranets) in Stockholm.

For two days intranet managers, editors, web strategists and communication managers gathered in Stockholm to talk about the benefits (and pitfalls) of having an intranet where the end-users share and contribute with their own and their colleagues information.
A number of larger companies and organization, such as TeliaSonera, Thomas Cook, Manpower and Perstorp, have started their second generation of intranets: where blogs, collaborative areas, wikis, personalization, micro blogging (see the twitter flow from the conference)  and Facebook-inspired solutions finally seem to work in a larger scale.

The pioneers, such as Fredrik Heidenholm from Skånemejerier, has been doing it without a large budget – proving that social intranets are more about users than expensive technical solutions.

Read interviews of Fredrik Heidenholm, Gunilla Rehnberg (Röda Korset) Hans Gustafsson (Boverket)  and Lisa Thorngren (Thomas Cook Northern Europe – Ving).

And in general, the speakers as well as the attendees seem to be agreeing with one another: having the whole organization contributing with their knowledge is a prerequisite for keeping the intranet alive.

But letting everyone create information requires a good search solution, something some of Findwise customers, such as Ericsson and Landstinget i Jönköping, talked about:
“Search promotes the value of our social intranet” said Karin Hamberg, Enterprise Architect, at Ericsson. Search makes it possible to gather information from all kind of sources and make it accessible from one entrance. However, this also requires strategies for handling security restrictions (who should have access to what?), meta data models, user experience (expectations and behavior) and ranking (who determinates which results that should appear on the very top?).
Sven-Åke Svensson, from Landstinget i Jönköping, had the same experiences and ephasised the need for a good prestudy (workshop method) and tools for the editors such as a meta data service to help the contributors write good meta tags. Sven-Åke also made a demo of the new intranet (if you are Swedish, the blog post “Landsting på väg mot det social intranätet” gives a great overview of the solution)

The two days covered most angles of Lew Platt’s vision – and apart from a number of good speakers the informal talk at coffee breaks and lunch gave a good insight in the fact that Swedish companies are working hard to provide an intranet that serves consumers as well as contributors.

Did you visit the conference? Was there anything in particular you found interesting? Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

P.S. If you want to read more about social intranets, take a look at Oscar Berg’s blogpost “The business case for social intranets”. An inspiring summary of the topic.

Lina Westerling

Structured and actionable results – there is more to results presentation than blue links

June 22 - 2010 | Lina Westerling

Search patterns are standardized patterns describing search functionality as well as human information seeking behavior. Earlier this year Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender released a book about search patterns.  Morville also gave a presentation based on the book at the IA Summit 2010 (slides, mp3), which my colleague Maria and I attended. Among the patterns Peter Morville mentions my favorite ones are structured and actionable search results.

Structured results
Let us start with structured results. You might have seen that for certain queries you submit on Google, you get a richer results presentation than for other results. For example, typing the query ‘weather stockholm’ gives a basic weather forecast for the upcoming four days, directly visible in the results list. Other examples include local movie showtimes and stock information. It is even possible to use google as a calculator or a currency converter by typing in certain kinds of searches. For the curious, here is a list of all google.com search features. Structured results is about offering a more informative presentation of search results than just a title, summary, and possibly some basic metadata. It is also about not presenting all information in the same way, because the information in itself differs. Richer results presentations speeds up the process of finding relevant information since the system has already done some pre-processing for user.

Google structured results

Examples of structured results from Google. Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/4274340130/sizes/l/in/set-72157623210542674/#cc_license.

Structured metadata is a prerequisite for structured results presentation. Web pages and documents normally come with standard metadata such as date and author, but in some cases they will have to be augmented with additional information in order to create a more useful presentation. Presenting results in a custom way requires some extra development effort, especially if the structure is not initially available. However, I believe it creates much value to the user. Also, this need not be done for all types of contents. My advice would be to identify the cases where a more elaborate results presentation would be most usable. Which information is frequently requested by many people and perhaps also difficult to find because it is embedded in pages with lots of text or other contents? Search logs and user feedback in combination with thorough knowledge about the contents provides a key basis for the selection.

Actionable results
Related to structured results are actionable results. Entries in the search results list can be more than just displays of information; they can also be means of performing tasks. Common examples found on the web include printing, saving or sharing the search result directly from the results list. Other examples include adding to shopping cart, commenting and rating. Within the enterprise or organization additional relevant actions could perhaps be checking in or out a document, add an event to the personal calendar, starting a chat with a co-worker, and so on. As with structured results, it is about identifying the cases where it would add most value. What are the most common tasks and possibly also what tasks are complicated to perform in the source system? Structured and actionable results share the advantage that users do not have to open the actual results web page or download the document to find or do what they need. Speeding up information seeking and other tasks in this way is not only valuable in web search, it can also be very useful within the enterprise or organization. Search results lists in enterprise search solutions still look quite homogeneous and there are lots of opportunities for improvement.

To conclude, there can and should be more to search results presentation than just a snippet. I believe we will benefit from putting focus on the results presentation, and not only on tools surrounding it (filtering for example). After all, the list of results is where the user’s attention is first drawn. What do you think? How can your organization benefit from working with structured and actionable search results? If you are curious about this approach, we would be happy to help you look into what can be done in your organization.

Caroline Abrahamsson

Search in SharePoint 2010

May 15 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

This week there has been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Since SharePoint 2007 has been the quickest growing server product in the history of Microsoft, the expectations on SharePoint 2010 is tremendous.

Apart from a great deal of possibilities when it comes to content creation, collaboration and networking, easy business intelligence etc.  the launch also holds another promise: that of even better search capabilities (with the integration of FAST).

Since Microsoft acquired FAST in 2008, there have been a lot of speculations about what the future SharePoint versions may include in terms of search. And since Microsoft announced that they will drop their Linux and UNIX versions in order to focus on higher innovation speed, Microsoft customer are expecting something more than the regular. In an early phase it was also clear that Microsoft is eager to take market shares from the growing market in internet business.

So, simply put, the solutions that Microsoft now provide in terms of search is solutions for Business productivity (where the truly sophisticated search capabilities are available if you have Enterprise CAL-licenses, i.e. you pay for the number of users you have) and Internet Sites (where the pricing is based on the number of servers). These can then be used in a number of scenarios, all dependent on the business and end-user needs.
Microsoft has chosen to describe it like this:

  • “Foundation” is, briefly put, basic SharePoint search (Site Search).
  • “Standard” adds collaboration features to the “Foundation” edition and allows it to tie into repositories outside of SharePoint.
  • “Enterprise ” adds a number of capabilities, previously only available through FAST licenses, such as contextual search (recognition of departments, names, geographies etc), ability to tag meta data to unstructured content, more scalability etc.

I’m not going to go into detail, rather just conclude that the more Microsoft technology the company or organization already use, the more benefits it will gain from investing in SharePoint search capabilities.

And just to be clear:  non-SharePoint versions (stand-alone) of FAST are still available, even though they are not promoted as intense as the SharePoint ones.

Apart from Microsoft’s overview above, Microsoft Technet provides a more deepdrawing description of the features and functionality from both an end-user and administrator point of view.

We look forward describing the features and functions in more detail in our upcoming customer cases. If you have any questions to our SharePoint or FAST search specialist, don’t hesitate to post them here on the blog. We’ll make sure you get all the answers.

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