Author: Lynda Moulton (Page 8 of 18)

When User Communities Take Control Everyone Wins

April 14, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 1 Comment

One of the LinkedIn groups I belong to has a great discussion started by Tom Burgmans , Enterprise Search Specialist at Wolters Kluwer, a publisher. The group is Enterprise Search Engine Professionals and has over 1,600 members. Tom began a discussion with this question: FAST Technical Users Group? As I read his call to action by the FAST user community, and the subsequent cheers in response from group members, I was delighted to see the swell of support. Here’s why.

This is a perfect example of where social tools meet a need. A suggestion I also made as a panelist at FastForward 2009 has emerged spontaneously as a direct result of market forces. My observation had been that the FAST user conference was largely attended by IT folks, and the overwhelming number of keynotes and session topics focused on social tools, not especially tied directly to search either. A recommended call to action directed to Microsoft was that they host a platform of social tools to facilitate genuine user community sharing around the FAST product. The people who most need this are search administrators and content managers who presumably have some governance responsibilities for searchable content.

In Tom’s suggestion we see the effective use of a social tool to generate interest among members, a large and focused audience who serve as a great test of the viability of his idea.

That is neat!

Almost 30 years ago when I ran a software company, we (the company) organized and ran annual user group meetings in tandem with a large professional conference that most of our customers attended. These meetings were very successful, well attended by 40 – 50% of our customers. Over almost 20 years the group spawned a lot of professional and collegial relationships that gave our small user community a sense of collective investment in furthering the improvement and support of the product around which they met. Efforts to turn over total control of the user group to the community were not successful because, in those days, the infrastructure needed for planning, organizing and running meetings across the North American geography did not exist. My company provided that support mechanism out of necessity.

However, three regional user groups began their own programs to share knowledge, and the entire user community collectively published a “cookbook” of source code for reports that many of the users had built for use with the database application and wanted to share with others.

Today the opportunities for building these communities of practice have a vast number of “free” social tools to employ, so that barrier has gone away. More important, the benefits to the user community are limitless. It gets to drive discussion about the product, share hints, workarounds, and tips for successful implementations. The user community gets to decide what is important, what is needed in the knowledge-base of operational information. It can call for product changes, improvements and use social platforms for galvanizing the community around specific issues.

One of the best outcomes we saw with our own user community was around a visitation day at our offices for customers to meet together to “test-drive” an alpha version of a major new release. We purposely stayed out of the meeting for an extended period. Later we learned that when each had developed a “wish list” of changes and tweaks to the release, some rather marginal choices had died a natural death as a result of the “wisdom of the crowd.” This was an ideal scenario for us as a development company because we did not have to disappoint any individual users with a unilateral decision to reject their ideas.

Trust me when I recommend to the enterprise search user community, you will empower yourselves in ways you can’t imagine when you join forces with other customers to drive the improvements and success of any product you use and value.

Search Fundamentals: Why Search Fails Us

April 9, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

When search fails me, the reasons may be hard to discover as a user but once on the inside of an enterprise I can learn a lot about what is going on. After listening to scores of business case studies, personal experiences and reading about rampant dissatisfaction with search it is discouraging to recognize the simple reasons for most negative outcomes.

Consider this scenario. I was attempting to find the address of the office of a major global platform vendor (one of the largest) that sells an entire suite of enterprise search and content management software products. One can usually find business location information from links on the home page of any corporate Web site or at least from the site representing the division one is visiting. But there was no such link for this corporate site. Then using the “search” box and later the “advanced search” option, trying a dozen variations of the division name, town in which the office is located, and product names I struck out on every query. All paths lead to a page with a single corporate address, or a couple of other remote addresses, and links to web pages that contained no address. Even those pages with addresses had no link to directions. I followed up with queries using Google and these got me back to the same dead-ends. Finally, I found the address through various online non-specific business directories.

This experience lead to a couple of conclusions about why my search failed: 1. The content does not exist; there is no such listing of locations. 2. The search engine is not properly tuned or metadata is not supplied with labels such as “locations,” “directions,” “business offices,” etc. The immediate solution for this case is to ensure that someone with practical business sense and usability competency has ownership of the overall web site experience to make sure that essential company data is available and easy to find. Or, if the company has made a conscious decision not to publish that information, at the least they should have a page stating the alternative for potential visitors as to how they can find their destination or to what office they can direct postal mail.

I had to two reasons for needing this information; one was a visit to an individual who was not available to give me the address in time to reach the office, and the second was a personal follow-up letter after someone from the company had been a speaker at an event I chaired. As things stand, I have been left with personal skepticism about the commitment of this company to build, produce and actually use content management or search products that will be truly responsive to needs of their potential buyers. When you don’t or can’t showcase your products, I question “why.” This is not a technology problem; it is a human factors and human resource allocation problem.

This brings me to some search fundamentals:

No content – If content that customers or employees expect to find is not included in explicit directives to the search engine for the repositories to be crawled and indexed, it will never be found.
No metadata – Any content lacking explicit language likely to be used by a searcher will probably not be found if it also lacks sufficient metadata.
Poor indexing or search rule base – If the content being searched is business documents without many unique contextual “hooks,” such as product names, technical terminology or topics of narrow interest, the search engine being used must be “smart” enough to glean the intent of the searcher from the context of query. In my case, I supplied a half a dozen terms to layer the context, tried them in different combinations, with and without quotations around phrases, but nothing worked.

Conclusion, if you really don’t want searchers to find what they want to find, it is not hard at all to compromise findability. I will not arrive at my destination and you won’t get any first class letters from me.

March Madness in the Search Industry

April 2, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

In keeping with conventional wisdom, it looks like a number of entrepreneurs are using the economic downturn as opportunity time, judging from the larger than normal number of announcements in the enterprise search sector. The Microsoft acquisition of FAST, Autonomy’s foray into the document/content management market, and Google’s Search Appliance ramping its customer base are old news BUT we have a sweep of changes. Newcomers to the enterprise search marketplace and news of innovative releases of mature products really perked up in March. Here are my favorite announcements and events in chronological order and the reasons why I find them interesting:

Travis, Paul. March 2, 2009 Digital Reef Comes Out of Stealth Mode. 03/02/2009. Byteandswitch.com.

Startup offers content management platform to index unstructured data for use in e-discovery, risk mitigation, and storage optimization. Here is the first evidence that entrepreneurs see opportunity for filling a niche vacuum. In the legal market the options have been limited and pretty costly, especially for small firms. This will be an interesting one to watch. http://www.digitalreefinc.com/

Banking, Finance, and Investment Taxonomy Now Available from the the Taxonomy Experts at WAND. 03/02/2009, PR Web (press release), Ferndale,WA,USA

The taxonomy experts at WAND have made this financial taxonomy available now for integration into any enterprise search software. I have been talking with Ross Lehr, CEO at Wand, for over a year about his suite of vertical market taxonomies and how best to leverage them. I am delighted that Wand is now actively engaged with a number of enterprise search and content management firms, enabling them to better support their customers’ need for navigation. The Wand taxonomies offer a launching point from which organizations can customize and enhance the vocabulary to match their internal or customer interests. http://www.wandinc.com/main/default.aspx

Miller, Mark. Lucid Imagination » Add our Lucene Ecosystem Search Engine to Firefox. 03/02/2009

I predicted back in January that open source search and search appliances were going to spawn a whole new industry of services providers and expert integrators because there are just not enough search experts to staff in-house experts in all the companies that are adopting these two types of search products. Well, it is happening and these guys at Lucid are some of the smartest search technologists around. Here is an announcement that introduces you to a taste of what they can do. Check it out and check them out at http://www.lucidimagination.com/

To see the full article with commentary about: social search at NASA, QueSearch, MaxxCat, Aardvark on social search, Attivio, ConceptSearching, Google user-group, Simplexo, Endeca, Linguamatics, Coveo, dtSearch and ISYS.

Microsharing has benefits for NASA. 03/04/2009.

It has been about 18 months since I wrote on social search and this report reveals a program that takes the concept to a new level, integrating content management, expertise locators and search in a nifty model. To learn more about NASAsphere, read this report written by Celeste Merryman. Findings from the NASAsphere Pilot. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology Knowledge Arciteture (sic) and Technology Task [Force]. 08/20/2008. The success of the pilot project is underscored in this report recommendation: the NASAsphere pilot team recommends that NASAsphere be implemented as an “official” employee social networking and communication tool. This project is not about enterprise search per se, it just reflects how leveraging content and human expertise using social networks requires a “findability” component to have a successful outcome. Conversely, social tools play a huge role in improving findability.

March 16, 2009. QueSearch: Unlocking the Value of Structured Data with Universal Search really caught my eye with their claim to “universal search” (yes, another) for large and mid-size organizations.

This offering with a starting price of $19,500, is available immediately, with software and appliance deployment options. I tried to find out more about their founders and origins on their Web site without luck but did track down a Wikipedia article and a neat YouTube interview with the two founders, Steven Yaskin and Paul Tenberg. It explains how they are leveraging Google tools and open source to deliver solutions.

Stronger, Better, Faster — MaxxCat’s New Search Appliance Aspires to Be Google Search Appliance Killer, by Marketwire. 03/11/2009.

This statement explains why the announcement caught my attention: MaxxCat product developers cite “poor performance and intrinsic limitations of Google Mini and Google Search Appliance” as the impetus to develop the device. The enterprise search appliance, EX-5000, is over seven times faster than Google Search Appliance (GSA) and the small business search appliance, the XB-250, is 16 times faster than Google Mini. There is nothing like challenging the leading search appliance company with a statement like that to throw down the gauntlet. OK I’m watching and will be delighted to read or hear from early users.

Just one more take on “social search” as we learn about Aardvark: Answering the Tough Questions, David Hornik on VentureBlog. 03/12/2009

This week the Aardvark team is launching the fruits of that labor at South By Southwest (SXSW). They have built a “social search engine” that lives inside your IM and email. It allows you to ask questions of Aardvark, which then goes about determining who among your friends and friends of friends is most qualified to answer those questions. As the Aardvark team point out in their blog, Social Search is particularly well suited to answer subjective questions where “context” is important. I am not going to quibble now but I think I would have but this under my category of “semantic search” and natural language processing. Until we see it in action, who knows?

A new position at Attivio was announced on March 16th, Attivio Promotes John O’Neil to Chief Scientist, which tells me that they are still expanding at the end of their first official year in business.

Getting to the point, 03/18/2009, KMWorld. http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=53070

Several announcements about Concept Searching’s release v. 4 of its flagship product, conceptClassifier for SharePoint highlight the fact that Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST has not slowed the number of enterprise search solution companies that continue to partner with or offer independent solutions for SharePoint. In this case the company offers its own standalone concept search solution applications for other content domains but is continuing to bank on lots of business from the SharePoint user community. This relationship is reflected in these statements: The company says features include a new installer that enables installation in a SharePoint environment in less than 20 minutes, requires no programmatic support and all functionality can be turned on or off using standard Microsoft SharePoint controls. Full integration with Microsoft Content Types and greater support for multiple taxonomies are also included in this release. Once the FAST search server becomes a staple for Microsoft SharePoint shops, there will undoubtedly be fallout for some of these partners.

Being invited to the Google Enterprise Search Summit in Cambridge, MA on March 19, 2009 was an opportunity for me to visit Google’s local offices and meet a bunch of customers.

They were a pretty enthusiastic crowd and are enjoying a lot of attention as this division of Google works to join the ranks of other enterprise application software companies. I suspect that it is a whole new venture for them to be entertaining customers in their offices in a “user-group like” forum but the Google speakers were energetic and clearly love the entrepreneurial aspects of being a newish run-away success within a run-away successful company. New customer announcements continue to flow from Google with SITA (The State Information Technology Agency in South Africa) acquiring GSA to drive an enterprise-wide research project. The solution will also be deployed and implemented by JSE-listed IT solutions and services company Faritec, and RR Donnelly. Several EMC users were represented at the meeting, which made me ask why they aren’t using the search tools being rolled out by the Documentum division…well, don’t ask.

Evans, Steve. Simplexo boosts public sector search options. Computer Business Review – UK. 03/18/2009.

This is interesting as an alternative to the Lucene/solr scene, UK-based open source enterprise search vendor Simplexo has launched a new search platform aimed at the public sector, which aims to enable central and local government departments to simultaneously search multiple disparate data sources across the organisation on demand. I have wondered when we would see some other open source offerings.

And all of the preceding is about just the startups (plus EMC at Google) and lesser known company activity. This was not a slow month. I don’t want all my contacts in the “established” search market to think that I am not paying attention because I am. I’ve exchanged communications with or been briefed by these known companies with news about new releases, advancing market share, or new executive teams. In no particular order these were the highlights of the month:

Endeca announced three new platforms on Mar 23, 2009: Endeca Announces the Endeca Publishing Suite, Giving Editors Unprecedented Control Over the Online Experience; Endeca Announces the Endeca Commerce Suite, Giving Retailers Continuous Targeted Merchandizing; and Endeca Unveils McKinley Release of the Information Access Platform, Allowing for Faster and Easier Deployment of Search Applications

Linguamatics Agile Text Mining Platform to Be Used by Novo Nordisk. 03/26/2009

I had a fine briefing by Coveo’s CEO Laurent Simoneau and Michel Besmer new VP of Global Marketing and see them making great strides capturing market share across numerous verticals where rapid deployment and implementation are a big selling point. They also just announced: Bell Mobility and Coveo Partner to Create Enterprise Search from Bell, an Exclusive Enterprise-Grade Mobile Search Solution.

A new Version 7.6 of a mainstay, plug-and-play search solution for SMBs since 1991, dtSearch, was just released. 3/24/2009

And finally, ISYS is having a great growth path with a new technology release, ISYS File Readers, new executives and a new project … completed in conjunction with ArnoldIT.com. Steve Arnold, industry expert and author of the Beyond Search blog, compiled more than a decade of Google patent documents. To offer a more powerful method for analyzing and mining this content, we produced the Google Patent Search Demonstration Site, powered by our ISYS: web application.

Weatherwise, March, 2009 is out like a lamb but hot, hot, hot when it comes to search.

You too Can Have an Analyst on Demand

March 17, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

A couple of years ago the Gilbane Group rolled out a service it calls, Gilbane Analysts On Demand. The idea was that a company could subscribe to access to Gilbane’s lead and senior analysts for an unlimited number of short calls each year, across all the practice areas. I championed the idea and have suggested it as a good service for start-up content and search related companies. It is a good way for them to pick the brains of experts who have a lot of experience in their particular market niche or to cast about for a different perspective on how they might better approach their marketing, product expansion or services. I’ve had questions related to positioning, possible names or “tag lines,” pricing, and the type of partners a company might want to seek. I also encourage clients to talk to me about “what customers want” in terms of packaging and delivery. In 30 minutes to an hour, a lot of valuable information can be conveyed and, as an analyst I love helping companies think through a solution efficiently. Sometimes, just talking through the issue brings them to an obvious answer or to a better question to have answered. Business guidance seems to prevail over “enterprise search.”

Now that we have had a little experience with this type of service, I have decided that it would serve technology “buyers,” just as well. The service might prove even more effective for some companies than a lengthy contract for consulting services. Companies devote long lead times to thinking about, budgeting, selecting and procuring software solutions. Most of them don’t want a consultant waiting in the wings for the next evolution in a project. What they would like is an expert they can turn to at each project gate where a pivotal decision needs to be made, or for a little guidance on an approach or what the next step should be. As an analyst, talking to technology customers is valuable because I can hear customer thoughts and ideas about products and companies and then present these as anonymous feedback when appropriate.

The Gilbane Group has a long reputation for product independence. Our sponsored research, white papers and webinars focus on timely topical themes, not product briefings or marketing buzz for a particular client. We help vendors get out educational messages about how they view markets, customer needs, tool implementation and strategies for leveraging technologies. We give voice to the values they espouse as companies. When we work for a vendor, we also share advice about how they are perceived in the marketplace, and how to improve their brand because we believe that good and healthy companies make for a vibrant marketplace.

I’ve been told, “off-the-record,” that, while the Gilbane model is laudable, no vendor believes in true analyst or consultant independence. While I am sorry to hear that this might be the prevailing view, it is like saying that no bank can be trusted because of the current financial crisis. Are you hiding your money under the mattress, yet?
Not only are we a trustworthy resource – we have a lot of good people with terrific expertise. Check out the cast of characters at: Gilbane Contacts and consider how great it would be to have them all a phone call or email communication away. Just a thought.

Enterprise Search and Collaboration, or is it Compliance?

March 12, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

For two weeks in a row I have been struck by the appearance of full page ads on the inside cover of Information Week for Autonomy ControlPoint. For a leading search vendor, this positioning is interesting and raises a number of rhetorical questions about Autonomy’s direction and perhaps even the positioning of search in the marketplace. Top of my mind are these:

How will Autonomy be viewed by IT folks, whom I assume are the principal readers of Information Week?
Is this a shift away from an emphasis on search as “search” by Autonomy?
Is Autonomy just expanding its range to broader business interests to gain better enterprise penetration?
Will their deep technical competence in search be as rich in the areas of governance and compliance?

To try to get a handle on all of this, since the second ad had no URL, I went to the electronic version online at Information Week archives but discovered that the ads don’t appear in the PDF. No problem; I went to the advertisers’ index and clicked on the Autonomy link, thinking that the link would take me to the ControlPoint pages on their Web site. It only took me to the main page for Autonomy where there was nothing referring to ControlPoint, compliance, regulation or governance (all words prominent in the magazine print ads). I tried the drop-down for Products; nothing there either. At least Autonomy uses IDOL as its search engine on its own Web site, so I tried it. Yea! ControlPoint appeared in the results; the first entry got me to a page describing it.

But what else did I learn by following the breadcrumbs? A step back to the “products” level brought me to an Autonomy Electronics Records Management description and I began to notice the logo in the upper right said “Autonomy Meridio.” Lots of clicks later, I discovered that Meridio was acquired by Autonomy in 2007, which I probably would have known if I had paid more attention to “non-search” stuff. ControlPoint belongs in that family of products. When I clicked on this sidebar link, Autonomy ControlPoint: Information Governance for SharePoint and this one, Meridio eDRM for Microsoft Office, more questions came to mind:

Is Autonomy, the search company with its Meridio and Interwoven acquisitions, having a serious run at Microsoft by entering their traditional markets?
If an office tools software company like Microsoft slides into the search market by acquiring FAST and then leverages its great success with SharePoint by making FAST its default search offering, why shouldn’t Autonomy turn the tables?
By appealing to IT professionals will Autonomy be able to gain mind share that pits them directly against Microsoft with language like “Named Email and Compliance Vendor of the Year by Financial-i” and “Is SharePoint enough?”

Yes, we are going well Beyond Search, aren’t we?

Why Copy Your Competitors Bad Choices? Search Can Work for You

March 3, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

I’ve often been curious about why companies frequently procure enterprise applications used by their competitors, destined to be followers instead of leaders. It seems to reflect a lack of imagination but, more importantly, a lack of confidence that one could select another solution with more possibilities for enhancing the organization’s competitiveness.
Look at three popular concepts about search:

The search box for keyword search is dead or only marginally useful
Professionals spend 10 – 20% of their workday searching (and often unsuccessfully)
Vast amounts of critical unstructured content is un-discoverable in most enterprises leaving organizations at risk in litigation, weak in leveraging fundamental knowledge and research for innovation, poor at customer support because known solutions can’t be found, and competitive intelligence is scarce to unearth because so much of it lies hidden in desktop email in-boxes.

If we accept these propositions, doesn’t it say something about the “leaders” in the search industry that we believe and accept so little from search?

Why do most organizations not try to solve at least one of these problems by seeking solutions that will save hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted labor, litigation costs, R&D expense, or lost customers due to poor service? Why do companies seek to procure search applications from companies that have been around for a decade or more, licensing evolutionary products, not revolutionary ones? Why would a company ignore innovative new products in favor of products that have given “search” a bad reputation? Why do organizations make hundred thousand dollar, or more, procurements without expending a few hundred dollars on documented product comparisons, and instead rely on a few widely published charts with less than a page or two on each product?

Most important, why are organizations not seeking search applications that will give them an edge by uncovering a nugget that will get a product to market faster, help marketing groups position a product better against the competition, or give support services representatives superior tools for getting information back to customers instantly with a proven solution to a query? Where is the will to apply search technology more astutely than your competitors in every area of your business? Why is search not expected to perform flawlessly and be as ubiquitous as any other software tool in your workflow? It does not have to be a poor performing stepchild but it does require its own experts to be well executed. Come to think of it, I have never seen a help wanted posting requiring expertise in search technology implementation. Hmmm…

There are well over a hundred viable search applications and hundreds of other applications that have search embedded for point solutions. You may need to acquire, implement and maintain a number of products across the enterprise to realize all the benefits search can bring but these products can work together, just as other components of a well-run enterprise do. At a time when organizations are cutting employees, appropriate search solutions may just offset the loss of expertise by uncovering at least some of the lost assets left behind.

Federated Search: Setting User Expectations

February 24, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

In the past few months, it is rare that I am briefed on an enterprise search product without a claim to provide “federated search.” Having worked with the original ANSI standard, Z39.50, and on one of the many review committees for it back in the early 1990s, it is a topic that always catches my attention.

Some of the history of search federation is described in this rather sketchy article at Wikipedia. However, I want clarify the original call for such a standard. It comes from the days when public access to search technologies was available primarily through library on-line catalogs in pubic and academic institutional libraries. A demand for the ability to search not only one’s local library system and network (e.g. a university often standardized on one library system to include all the holdings of a number of its own libraries), but also the holdings of other universities or major public libraries. The problem was that the data structures and protocols from one library system product to the next varied in way that made it difficult for the search engine of the first system to penetrate the database of records in another system. Records might have been meta-tagged similarly, but the way the metadata were indexed and accessible to retrieval algorithms was not possible with a translating layer between systems. Thus, the Z39.50 standard was established, originally to let one library system’s user search from that library system into the contents of other libraries with different systems.

Ideally, results were presented to the searcher in a uniform citation format, organized to help the user easily recognize duplicated records, each marked with location and availability. Usually there was a very esoteric results presentation that could only be readily interpreted by librarians and research scholars.

Now we live in a digitized content environment in which the dissimilarities across content management systems, content repositories, publishers’ databases, and library catalogs have increased a hundred fold. The need for federating or translation layers to bring order to this metadata or metadata-less chaos has only become stronger. The ANSI standard is largely ignored by content platform vendors, thus leaving the federating solution to non-embedded search products. A buyer of search must do deep testing to determine if the enterprise search engine you have acquired actually stands up well under a load of retrieving across numerous disparate repositories. And you need a very astute and experienced searcher with expert familiarity of content in all the repositories to make an evaluation as to suitability for the circumstance in which the engine will be used.

So, let’s just recap what you need to know before you select and license a product claiming to support what you expect from search federation:

Federated search is a process for retrieving content either serially or concurrently from multiple targeted sources that are indexed separately, and then presenting results in a unified display. You can imagine that there will be a huge variation in how well those claims might be satisfied.
Federation is an expansion of the concept of content aggregation. It has play in a multi-domain environment of only internal sites OR a mix of internal and external sites that might include the deep (hidden) web. Across multiple domains complete federation supports at least four distinct functions:
- Integration of the results from a number of targeted searchable domains, each with its own search engine
- Disambiguation of content results when similar but non-identical pieces of content might be included
- Normalization of search results so that content from different domains is presented similarly
- Consolidation of the search operation (standardizing a query to each of the target search engines) and standardizing the results so they appear to be coming from a single search operation

In order to do this effectively and cleanly, the federating layer of software, which probably comes from a third-party like MuseGlobal, must have “connectors” that recognize the structures of all the repositories that will be targeted from the “home” search engine.

Why is this relevant? In short, because it is expected by users that when they search, all the results they are looking at represent all the content from all the repositories they believed they were searching in a format that makes sense to them. It is a very tall order for any search system to do this but when enterprise information managers are trying to meet a business manager’s or executive’s lofty expectations, anything less is viewed as the failure of enterprise search. Or else, they better set expectations lower.

From the FastForward Blogger: A Microsoft User Group Meeting

February 19, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

I was at FastForward last week, invited to be a participant in a panel of bloggers on the last day, tasked to react to three days of executive, partner and customer presentations to the FAST search user community. Four of us had more ideas than we could share in a 30 minute panel session. The other three fellows on the panel are regular bloggers on FastForward. Along with them, I had the pleasure of listening to and speaking with numerous other industry analysts and commentators over the three-day period in the “blogger/analyst lounge” where we gathered between sessions.

Before making some observations of my own, I will introduce you to a few of the folks who have had and will continue to have a continuing presence in the content and search arena, particularly as it relates to social tools and knowledge management, two tightly connected areas of interest.

Each of us was interviewed for a kind of video blog session during the meeting. Although you can’t view the panel from the final keynote session, I can share these links that will give you an idea of what my cohorts were thinking about the meeting and the state of FastForward in 2009. They are:

Jon Husband, social computing thought leader and architect. He has coined the term “wirearchy,” which aptly describes a flow of connectedness over the wires (and wireless) air waves. I really liked his observations about how social technologies encourage self-organizing around issues and make group action so much easier. His interview is a good listen and his blog is fun, too.
Jevon MacDonald, founder of Firestoker and FASTforward blog contributor, had some helpful comments in his interview about the usefulness of social media in aiding companies to be more responsive to their customers.
Euan Semple, independent advisor on social computing, elevated the discussion in favor of social tools improving the flow of knowledge, which is really the point of all this content and search related technology, as far as I am concerned. You’ll enjoy the interview with Euan in which he also comments on the ratio of men to women and the IT-centric audience at the meeting, something I observed, as well.
I was also interviewed by Josh-Michéle Ross and my thoughts dovetailed with the others in keeping with the social them of “engage your user,” the conference tag line. My mantra throughout the conference and after is that there was just not enough emphasis on how teams work together to build highly functional and easy-flowing search experiences for users. The process of creating a social platform in which search is present in subtle ways that assist connectedness among experts and their content requires human design; this is an art that can’t be left to “out-of-the-box” installed technologies. It is a task for those with an aptitude for what users really want, need and will use without being force-fed or artificially manipulated. Here are my comments in the interview.

Other interviews of interest can be found at the FastForward Bloggers page where a lot of thought leaders including Rob Paterson, Bill Ives, Clay Shirky, Charlene Li and Jim McGee among many others put forth some thoughtful comments about the state of technology.

Our panel moderator was, Perry Solomon, VP Business Development and General Manager, Worldwide Media Solutions – FAST. While on the big stage we did not get to speak on all the ideas he asked about in our preparatory session, I can bring them to light in the following. Solomon asked these questions followed by my thoughts after a few days to digest the meeting:

Q: How was the meeting balance in terms of search technology versus use?
LWM: The use cases were compelling and well presented. They were highly evocative of the best applications we can achieve with technology using all the social tools and content management options now available. This is appropriate in keynote/big theatre presentations but what I did not find in the few breakout sessions was more about the “nuts and bolts” of the human design and understanding needed to integrate components.

Among the attendees that I met during meals (system integrator partners from small firms and IT people who were struggling to build applications their internal customers wanted), there was a sense that not enough substantive information was being shared. They had hoped for more “how to” and concrete case studies that described the process of getting from purchasing licenses to deploying solutions. When I suggested to some of these Microsoft customers that it might be helpful to have more of their content managers and search administrators in the audience, they all agreed. None carried an attitude that they were going to design and implement these highly sophisticated content/search solutions with just members of the IT department. Business users were also notably absent from the meeting.

Q: What was the impact of the announcement about product news, FastSearch for Internet Business and FastSearch for SharePoint?
LWM: My own reaction was that it was a logical way to begin to roll out the FAST product with existing and evolving Microsoft products. It was not surprising, revolutionary or exciting. MS is clearly committed to making something of its huge investment in FAST; to align it with the rapidly evolving and highly popular SharePoint is smart business. The sentiment of others I spoke with was pretty much the same, sprinkled with a fair amount of skepticism about schedules for delivery and how well the products will be supported with services and documentation. Cost of ownership is always a big worry; what it will take to get the sizzle and super search results from this technology without a huge amount of human investment and skill on the part of customers or third-party integrators stimulates a deep “wait-and-see” attitude among most.

Q: What was missing or not addressed in the sessions?
LWM: The lack of presentations and involvement of non-IT people. While MS is highly responsive to the IT person’s desire for standardizing on a full-function platform and set of tools from a single supplier, this is not the reality in the marketplace. Content is created, manipulated and re-purposed with hundreds of applications that are used by business owners and content managers who bring a deep understanding of what needs to be applied to get the “social” workflow operational and productive in any given culture. My own bias is that the subtleties of organizational culture are often lost on many in IT but are more understood by those deeply immersed in engagement with both experts and their content. A “user-group” meeting must include these “others” and have sessions that support their professional interests so they come away learning substantive stuff from those others in similar situations.

Although “search” was the nominal reason for the meeting, there was no discussion about what it takes to get to the ultimate “user-engagement.” Search remains, “smoke and mirrors.” Search behind the firewall was still pretty thin as a concept and the emphasis was on e-commerce and monetization. There was a lot of talk about business & customer experiences engaging with search but not much substance as to how to actually create rich search experiences.

Q: What are we going to be talking about a year from now?
LWM: I hope the engagement will provide less visionary “hype,” which is not real high-value for the audience in heavy doses. If the meeting becomes more about getting customers to a successful outcome through the engagement of teams with IT, developers, content and business owners coming to a problem using a thoughtful design approach, attendees will leave with a higher commitment to embrace the technology.

Finally, I believe that, as FastSearch solutions are implemented and tested, customers will come to these meetings with higher expectations for helpful case studies that talk about “how the sausage is made,” the role of connectors and the actual tuning for higher relevancy. Much reference to search federation will give way to what federation really is and its many tiers of sophistication. Presentation of search results in ways that are compelling and trustworthy for users will need to be explained in more substantive sessions. I hope that we will be talking about social team interaction for implementing compelling search technology experiences for users.