Lou Rosenfeld

Seth Earley

April 17th
Session 1: Search as an Application and Using Search Analystics
This session will cover the big picture issues and challenges surrounding the findability of information. 

Information has grown more complex, yet users expect simpler access mechanisms.  There are more tools and approaches available and it’s no longer simply a matter of “buying a search engine”.  We will talk about how context and process are essential considerations to search strategy and search applications and why “just getting a good search engine” is an oversimplification of the problem. 

We’ll also take a deeper dive into Search Analytics.  One of the challenges to any business justification is having the data to back up recommendations or develop a course of action. 

Any site with a search engine logs users' search queries. This is real data that's plentiful and inexpensive to acquire, and not necessarily difficult to analyze. Search query data tells you what users really want from your site—in their own words—and how well you're meeting those needs. Lou Rosenfeld will introduce site search analytics, showing how analyzing those queries diagnose and fix major problems with your site's content, metadata, navigation, and search functions.

Rennie Walker


Stephanie Lemieux

April 24th
Session 2: Creating a Search Center of Excellence
This session will cover issues in analysis, development and tuning search systems and building competencies in search application development.

Search projects should begin with a current state analysis of search effectiveness.  A “search audit” provides an understanding of how well search is meeting user’s needs.  This takes into consideration user tasks and perspectives, the types of information being accessed and leverages multiple information sources.

Mike Ferguson

Chris Modzelewski

Vendor: ChartSearch

May 1st
Session 3: Types of search: Mechanisms and Approaches
Content is heterogeneous.  Search tools and mechanisms can vary along with types of content and information sources. 
This session will survey different classes of search tool and how to match search approaches with access scenarios.  We will cover classes of search technology and review the differences between metadata based search, full text search, rules based approaches, various statistical approaches.  Increasingly search is being used in conjunction with highly structured data such as that from Business Intelligence systems.  We’ll look at the “continuum of content structure” and how search can access more conventional corporate data sources.

This session looks at the growing role of Search in an Enterprise BI Environment. With such a simple medium familiar to most people, opening up interactive use of BI via search can have enormous business benefits. Search can be used to open up BI access to a much wider group of users and also provide a way to extract additional insight from unstructured content. Also Search can offer up a new form of intelligence from analysis of all content indexed by search.

Ted Sullivan

 
Theresa Regli

May 8th
Session 4: Advanced topics and the Vendor Landscape
This final session will cover complex issues of integration and federated search, as well as discuss semantic search and other future developments.  What is the effect of the semantic web and ontology management?  How can advanced tools like concept searching, topic maps improve search recall and precision?  What is on the horizon for search?

We will also hear from analyst Theresa Regli who will give us “The real story about the Enterprise Search market: an independent analyst perspective”

Tired of the marketing hype? Wondering what the real story is around enterprise search technology, what the tools really can and can’t? Join Theresa Regli, search analyst with vendor-independent analyst company CMS Watch, as she compares several of the leading enterprise search vendors head-to-head. Based on her extensive research with search tool users and customers, you’ll hear the straight dope on where the vendors do (or don’t) live up to the hype.