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Optimizing SharePoint Search and Findability

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Many organizations continue to be disappointed in SharePoint 2010, because search returns too much content. It is still difficult and often impossible to easily find the most useful content. As a consequence, business stakeholders remain frustrated with IT.

This series focuses on how to increase the value of SharePoint 2010 to end users by improving the effectiveness of search. Each session looks at a key issue and provides practical guidance to anyone involved in a SharePoint 2010 deployment, portal or search optimization projects.

Thank you to our series sponsor:

Session 1 - The Role of Information Architecture in Optimizing SharePoint Search and Navigation

Date: 
June 06, 2012 - 1:00 - 2:30 EDT
Speakers: 
. Seth Earley, Jeff Carr, Leslie Owens

Seth Earley kicks off the session with an overview of the entire four-call series. He lays out several key challenges faced by organizations moving to SharePoint 2010.  Seth provides his perspective on the four best practices that organizations must adopt to improve content findability.

Leslie Owens, Senior Analyst with Forrester, provides insights on how to ensure that the users’ voice is reflected in the information architecture –in particular, in the taxonomy and content types.  She shows why a user-centric information architecture is critical to improving business processes.

Jeff Carr addresses challenges around the growth of enterprise information. He defines the problem of search and shows how to make search projects successful.   Jeff covers practical techniques for designing findability solutions in the context of content and users, and their alignment with work processes and business priorities.

Session 2 - Approaches to Search-Based Applications using SharePoint, FAST and 3rd-Party tools

Date: 
June 13, 2012 - 1:00 - 2:30 EDT
Speakers: 
. Mike Himelstein, Michal Pisarek, Stuart Laurie

Many organizations find that search solutions using native SharePoint search return results sets that are too large and don’t sufficiently address user needs.  This session explores approaches for enhancing the search experience through the use of FAST and 3rd- party tools.

Beyond 10 Blue Links.  Search is powering that application?

Search.  We all know it.  A search box, a search button, and 10 blue links…right? 

Wrong.

In this session, Mike Himelsteim will discuss Search Based Applications and the 2 core components that make a Search Based Application

  1. Agile Information Integration  - to securely unify, organize, and classify data from across all of your various enterprise systems and LOB applications, and present/visualize it, ending the days of information silos. 
  2. Information Orchestration – Leverage the modular nature of SharePoint Web Parts to quickly assemble a composed, orchestrated view of inter-related information that provides immediate business value

Leveraging your Information Architecture in Search

Now that you have created a taxonomy that your users understand how can you leverage this information using the SharePoint search engine to deliver a rich, compelling search experience to your users? In his talk, SharePoint MVP Michal Pisarek will cover three simple configuration options that provide incredible value for little effort in search.

  1. Learn how to create scopes that your users will both use and understand.
  2. Show how custom results pages can both save users time whilst encouraging them to enter in metadata.
  3. Finally see the value in configuring filters for search results that allow users to refine results quickly and easily to exactly what they are looking for.

Enhancing Search With 3rd Party Tools

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Session 3 - Understanding SharePoint Metadata and its Application to the Information Lifecycle

Date: 
June 20, 2012 - 1:00 - 2:30 EDT
Speakers: 
. Ruven Gotz, Christian Buckley, Bill English

This session introduces key metadata concepts (including taxonomy, folksonomy and content types). It will then provide a construct for managing metadata within SharePoint. Finally, we will look at the end-to-end lifecycle of content and its associated metadata and its impact on findability and putability. 

Understanding Taxonomy, Content Types and Metadata

Introducing the concept of metadata using metaphors that clarify its value and demonstrate its applicability to solving information management problems with SharePoint. We will see how you can elicit metadata from your stakeholders and how to organize the resulting structures in a way that they can understand. 

Folksonomy and Metadata Governance

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Session 4 - SharePoint Portal Solutions - Aligning Business Process, User Needs and Content

Date: 
June 27, 2012 - 1:00 - 2:30 EDT
Speakers: 
. Seth Earley, Seth Maislin, Erik Wolf

As the volume of information creeps up in your SharePoint portal, so does the importance of sound navigation and metadata that can be leveraged for search.  This requires designs that take into account content, users and business processes.  Equally important are effective approaches to organization strategies and governance.

Erik Wolf, discusses how Applied Materials created a search-based application that enables dynamic content delivery built on top of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Fast Enterprise Search, SmartlogicSemaphore and BA Insight.

Seth Maislin speaks about embedded search: taking the information collected during user-centric information design and using that to contextually aggregate content from disparate sources into a content dashboard. He'll show how use cases, content mapping, metadata design, taxonomy, content object models, and user profiles can be leveraged so that users no longer have to click the Submit button to get exactly the content they're looking for.

Attendees will leave with an understanding of the holistic nature of information access processes and design and how "fixing search" requires addressing content processes and user needs in a cohesive, integrated framework