8:30 am – 9:45 am

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Social technologies are transforming the way that people use the web and, with it, the way that companies engage with their customers and employees. Search is certainly being affected by the increasingly social nature of online activities. Impacting the socialization of search are the factoring in of the social graph and social activities into search results. Also, online people increasingly turn to their social networks when seeking information, recognizing that these people are likely to lead them to results. Li, a former Forrester analyst, provides insights into how social technologies are transforming the way people  search for and discover information and how you can prepare your organization for—and create business advantage with—this shift.

Many have felt the pain associated with embarking on search improvement projects that failed to deliver significantly better results. Users still struggle to find useful information quickly and easily. To make matters worse, most search improvement projects usually require a significant amount of time, specialized resources, and money. There is a better way: The secret to achieving great search results is to understand intent by observing user actions, and delivering targeted results based on what other users with the same intent found most useful. Baynote CEO Jack Jia will discuss this “UseRank”-based approach for improving search relevancy. Dave Dondero, Director of Online Knowledge Management & Performance Support at Kaiser Permanente, will join Jack to share real-world results that illustrate why “actions speak louder than words” when it comes to delivering effective search results.

Semantic technology is all the rage, sometimes even dubbed “Web 3.0.” However, many people—especially those making technology decisions for enterprises—wonder whether semantic technology has meaningful applications in the enterprise. Based on hands-on experience working with semantic tools, this panel of experts will establish the boundaries between reality and hype and help you understand what enterprises can gain from semantic technology in the here and now.

Many social media websites, ecommerce engines, and independent software vendors use open source Apache Lucene/Solr as their enterprise search technology. The technology is used by networks such as AOL, LinkedIn, MySpace and Wikipedia; online retailers such as Netflix and Zappos; and is embedded in many commercial products from both proprietary and open source vendors. Over the past few years, Lucene/Solr has made great strides in terms of scalability, accuracy, and performance to become a mature, robust, enterprise-ready alternative to pricey proprietary search products. In addition to the obvious low total cost of ownership advantage, Lucene/Solr search technology also features excellent out of-the-box relevancy ranking, query speed, and query throughput. During this session, Krellenstein will outline the benefits of Lucene/Solr compared to other
search solutions; the cost advantages provided to enterprise users; how Lucene/Solr technologies are being used by enterprises around the world for mission-critical search functionality; how companies can quickly and cost-effectively implement it, including details of the costs associated with implementing and maintaining Lucene/Solr.

Today--more than ever before--companies must derive maximum value from their information assets. All employees must be armed with complete, current information--presented in context, when they need it. It is particularly challenging to incorporate both structured and unstructured content into data-driven applications, such as BI and CRM. In today's fast moving, highly adaptable business environment, users' needs for information access have moved beyond data warehousing, enterprise search, and business intelligence solutions. This session will examine the evolution of enterprise search and BI/DW and how the capabilities people want from these distinct areas are finally being achieved by unified information access (UIA).

Companies are seeing an exponential growth in the amount of data in their Oracle databases and it has become more difficult and more expensive to index and search very large databases. Traditional solutions have been costly in terms of hardware and software licenses. Satterthwaite will demonstrate how to enable effective search in Oracle and other massive JDBC-compliant databases affordably, offloading the computational search burden off of the database application, providing extremely fast indexing and query response speeds, and searching unstructured data within CLOBs within a database.

Most of the time when users say they want a Google box it is because of the poor information design of the system they are currently using. The problem at the heart of this is that users don’t really want to search for information; they want to find it. Findability in a corporate environment is very different from surfing the web, and the ubiquitous search box by itself will not deliver what users need. In this session, Mair and Margison will explore the context of what people want to find and how, through good information design, this can be achieved in intuitive ways. The end result is that the information design answers the question, “How do we use SharePoint’s flexible information assets such as libraries, lists, views, metadata, scoped and faceted search to give users information, know-how, and know-who at their fingertips?”

Many ECM designers promise users the capability to search for their corporate documents like they search for information on the web, even though strategies and information needs are often different for the two types of search. For both, though, the effectiveness of a search depends upon the trade-off of the recall vs. the precision of the system. The ideal search results include the return of all the documents that are relevant within a collection while not returning any documents that are irrelevant to the user's information needs. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task, particularly given the wide divide between the way users want to search and the way software developers design search engines. Additionally, relevance is difficult to measure as it can be defined on different dimensions and can be influenced by any number of factors. MacMillan will discuss the way today's search behaviors need to be better supported by interface designers and how organizations can support end users with training to improve search effectiveness within an organization.

Data mining, enterprise search, and document management themselves cannot lead to business intelligence. New techniques and capabilities are required discover, create and utilize enterprise knowledge. Enterprise search can provide a platform for bringing together enterprise data, models and visualizations to create a Computational Enterprise Knowledge Engine. This presentation will offer an overview of computational knowledge demonstrated via user implementations, providing a glimpse into the near future of enterprise knowledge.

Search is an essential component of content applications and helps users find the exact information they need. However, today’s organizations struggle with creating, collaborating, reusing, and delivering content throughout the enterprise. Content created by one group is often out of sight and out of mind of other groups. Because much content is duplicated in whole or in part, content delivered to internal/external audiences may be out of date, inconsistent, or just plain wrong. In this session, Mark Logic’s Jason Hunter describes how leading organizations are moving beyond the limitations of traditional search technologies and leveraging standard tools like XML servers, Microsoft Office, and SharePoint Server to deliver rich collaboration, content reuse, and powerful dynamic delivery of enterprise content.