Guest writing for CMS Wire

I have been approached by CMS Wire, who liked my writing on my humble little blog here, and so I will be writing at least one article a month for them, and the first one is now available here:

SharePoint Enterprise Search: Lessons Learned in the field

Briefly its about our experiences at work with SharePoint search. My manager and AVP have been working on this since well before I joined them. The Proof Of Concept which saw the enterprise search features of SharePoint deployed to a group of users within the IT division has been very successful. We are now moving into production with the facility to be provided to the whole of the IT division - around 500 people.

So its not 'enterprise' search across the whole of our enterprise, but it is 'federated search' in that many existing information silo's are being indexed.

If your interested in learning more, I will be joining my old friend Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd, and author of two excellent books on enterprise search, at Enterprise Search Summit East in New York.

We will be running a pre-conference workshop on Monday the 10th of May entitled: Getting the best from SharePoint Search Implementations. Hopefully we will see you there, come and say hi.

An Information Charter

I count my self lucky to be an acquitance, colleague and even friend of Martin White (of Intranet Focus Ltd) who has been in 'the business' a lot longer than I.

He has recently posted on his blog an 'information charter' which is condensed into six easy "bullet points". It is superb in its simplicity, its only short, but I won't copy and paste it here, I want you to click on the link and go to Martin's site to read it.

John Mancini of AIIM has already blogged on it and notes that IT Strategies should not be 100 page documents - well I am not sure I agree with that, but being able to distill that 100 page strategy into a 6 point charter is really going to make you think hard about it.

I know one thing, we certainly could not paste Martin's charter on our intranet in good faith at the moment, personally I reckon we are a 70 to 80% fail on five of the six points !

Books, books, more books, and free books too...

So I am just going to drop some 'authors' names in this post, just to show off that I know them, well I have to admit its not like any of them are Steven King or anything, but......

Martin White clued me in to an excellent new book on Search User Interfaces by Prof. Marti Hearst. Its a 'real' book, printed on paper and all that, but if you click on that title link you can read the entire thing online for free courtesy of Cambridge University Press - bless em' ! In fact his blog includes a posting on how he convinced the publisher to let him do that: http://www.searchuserinterfaces.com/blog/

Now as Martin brought this book to my attention, it is only fair that I bring it to the attention of my 3 regular readers (who probably already know) that Martin is the co-author of a rather spiffing book on search himself: Successful Enterprise Search Management (which is now available on Amazon as well as directly from the publisher).

I would think that if your running an enterprise search team in any organization these two books should definitely be on your shelf.

However my next read, when it arrives in the mail from New Zealand is SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration: Using SharePoint to enhance business collaboration by Michael Sampson, who is also the author of Seamless Teamwork.

Seamless Teamwork is on my desk at this very moment (see picture for proof!) but I have to admit by the time I bought it, everyone else had written (rave) reviews, so my aim this time is to get a review of SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration posted in good time. Well, when it arrives........

Totally off the topic of information management and search books, but for Micheal's benefit should he read this, I will qoute a conversation from a certain avaiation podcast I subscribe to:

• Technical Editor: I can never understand who the Australian's think the main threat is anyway
• European Editor: Well, the All Blacks are quite scary.........
  

Now if only I can get Martin and Micheal to collaborate (i.e. do all the work) on my 'seminal volume' on practical knowledge management....... :-)

Come and join the Intranet Best Practices workshop at J.Boye 09

I have the pleasure to announce that I will be running a pre-conference workshop at Janus Boye's innaugral North American conference: Philadelphia 09

The workshop is Intranet Best Practices and its a double act with my very good friend and colleague Martin White (of Intranet Focus Ltd).

Martin is also doing a session entitled: Making the most of SharePoint 2007 and I think current plans may see me doing an as yet to be determined session on the Intranet track.

Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media will also be there doing sessions on the e-Health and Intranet tracks, along with many other excellent speakers. The full programme is available here:

http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/schedule

I have paticipated in Janus' conferences before in Denmark, they are excellent and informative, so I hope you can come and join us !

Enteprise Search - its not just the technology

I had a great chat with Martin White of Intranet Focus today, he rang me from the UK. We worked together on various elements of the intranet and search projects that were under my pervue at the Open University.

He debriefed me on the Enterprise Search Summit 2008 in New York, for which Martin gave the keynote. He later sent me his slides so I could have a read myself. Now Martin's knowledge on search is encylopedic, and we have had many chats on various elements of the subject and it turned out that we had similar opinions about search and ECM, i.e. that sorting out search problems or enteprise content management problems are as much about planning, governance and building teams of people to 'manage' the technology - bottom line, as per usual its all about people and not the shiny new software.

Martin puts emphasis in his presentation slides about building a team to manage your search, when I was presenting on the OU ECM programme I would always be sure to emphasise the size and breadth of the multi-disciplinary team brought together to implement the strategy. Martin has posted a summary of the conference and some of his thoughts here.

Now this also fits with Prescient Digital Media's advice on implementing or improving intranets, that there should be an emphasis on planning, governance and 'managing'. Indeed to push the theme even further Toby recently posted on the Intranetblog on the Pro's and Con's of Sharepoint, qouting Shawn Shell, the author of the new CMS Watch Sharepoint report. Shawn's advise on how to ensure success in deploying Sharepoint also focuses on what might be called 'soft' aspects of information systems project management.

OK, so non of this is 'rocket science' to me, Martin, Toby or Shawn, but if your a newly promoted IT guy (hey, I've been there !) who's been told to implement Sharepoint, or buy a new search engine, the change management, people management and information management (metadata, taxonomies, classification schema's, 'findability' etc) aspects might be a long way from the top of your task list ! When it comes down to it they may not be at the forefront of the CIO's thoughts either.......

Having been involved around the periphery of a big CRM programme, and having watched colleagues do data warehousing and BI etc, non of this is specific to 'unstructured data' - but, time for the blatant plug (!) if your doing ECM, Intranet, CMS or search projects, Prescient can help to ensure you have the right executive backing, the right governance structures and the right team in place to implement your projects.

New search vendor and more on collaboration

Martin White of Intranet Focus was here yesterday, working on our Intranet redevelopment project with us. He mentioned a 'new' search engine vendor he had come across, DieselPoint who are based in Chicago.

I have added their link to the Search page of the resources site over at PageFlakes, where I have brought together a bunch of ECM, Entperise 2.0, Portals, Intranets and Enterprise Search links and RSS feeds.

Also very interesting, was Martin's take on the recent Gartner Portals Content and Collaboration summit in London. Martin's blog post is here, but to summarise the focus of the conference appears to have been on collaboration, and the realisation of enterprise CIO's that there are plenty of options other than Sharepoint or Notes - good news for all the vendors at the recent Office 2.0 conference !

Since the O2Con I have been trying to find time to play with the Sosius beta, and have not yet got round to playing with SmartSheets (but did send the link to Martin and our Intranet manager Nicky). To be honest I have been busy trying turn my british CV into a Canadian style Resume - but my wife and I use BaseCamp, and Google Docs & Sheets for planning immigration activity.

But once again there in lies the rub - just because Google have jumped into bed with CapGemini, and are attempting to solve the online / offline issues with 'gears' it does not mean 'web 2.0' consumer oriented tools are ready for 'enterprise 2.0' prime time. However whilst I can stick to my earlier assertion that the start-ups should concentrate on the SME niche, perhaps Martin's notes from the Gartner event suggest that CIO's are awakening to wider (outside or through the firewall) possibilities.