Those companies embarking on an Enterprise Search initiative should be aware of the fact that the majority of search initiatives fail. According to a study conducted by Accenture, 65% over users are completely dissatisfied with their search tool. The first step in avoiding a failed search initiative is recognizing that unlike other infrastructure projects, delivering a project on time and on budget does not mean the project was successful. The key to search is getting people to use the system, because unlike an email or Active Directory, users don’t have to use the tool you provide if they don’t like it.
The second step to a successful search project is recognizing that one size does not fit all. Companies and organizations produce and consume data in different ways. In many cases, this is the source of an organizations competitive advantage. Yes, you certainly can get SharePoint Search up and running quickly out of the box, but without considering how the search system can be optimized for the unique requirements of your company, much of the potential benefit of the system will never be truly realized.
The good news is that SharePoint Search is a platform. Microsoft designed it to be extensible. As a Microsoft partner, BA-Insight has developed a product called Longitude which extends the platform to provide features that one finds in best of breed competing solutions. Longitude is an add-on to SharePoint Search that provides enhanced usability, relevance, and connectivity.
Usability or user experience is a challenge for all enterprise search technologies. Users are so accustomed to searching on the Internet, that they expect enterprise search to be the same. The challenge here is that Office documents, PDF’s, etc, are much larger than simple web pages. As such, users must download, open, and manually search through them. Users find this experience to be arduous. To improve the user experience, Longitude provide a unique preview technology that enables users to preview the most relevant page in the document in the same amount of time that one would view a web page. This saves employees hours of time per year. The short video demo below showcases this functionality.
Usability Video Demo
Relevance is another challenge for enterprise search technologies. While most people think of relevance as being a relevance ranking issue, often poor relevance is related to poor connectivity. If SharePoint is not indexing the data in a system that is important to you, you will never get a relevant search result from SharePoint. This is another aspect of SharePoint Search that is highly extensible. SharePoint’s Protocol Handler Framework is what enables SharePoint to index different types of content sources such as file systems, SharePoint Sites, etc. While SharePoint can index the most common data sources out of the box, Microsoft leaves connecting to other systems and custom applications to partners such as BA-Insight. BA-Insight’s Longitude provides a connector framework that enables SharePoint to index ECM systems such as Exchange Private Mailboxes, Documentum, Hummingbird, WorkSite, and Symantec’s Enterprise Vault. Longitude is also capable of indexing ERP, CRM, and custom database applications. The short video demo below highlights some of the key functionality that the connectors provide.
Connector Framework Video Demo
Whether you use BA-Insight’s product to extend SharePoint Search, or do it yourself, doing so dramatically improves the chances that your search initiative is successful and SharePoint Search becomes a mission critical application in your organization.
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