Search Done Right

I’m in Amsterdam this week for the Global Benchmarking Group’s Intranets and Portals Forum. Although it’s not a search-specific show, it’s a good event for organizations across Europe to discuss the challenges they’re facing from intranets, websites and Web 2.0 technologies.

There were presentations from some top-tier multinational corporations – and each told a remarkably similar story. These companies were faced with no single corporate intranet, but rather hundreds of disparate (and some even rogue) sites run by individual departments or product lines. There was, of course, no consistency in the look and feel of all these sites.

Recognizing the challenges this poses, each company sought to implement a unified standard intranet, including Microsoft SharePoint as part of its solution. And each found a need for search beyond SharePoint. While they had some success in using SharePoint’s search feature to find content within the team sites, most found that it lacked the ability to comprehensively search their other existing repositories, which in many cases are an importance source of legacy information.

That puts these organizations in a bind. They can either wait for SharePoint’s search to improve – as some industry analysts suggest – or they can take action to solve this problem today. While most IT departments aren’t looking for new projects to spend money on these days, the option of waiting another year or two to see what Microsoft comes up with isn’t all that appealing – especially for a solution that impacts 100 percent of your employees, typically is in the six-figure cost range and can often be implemented in only a few weeks.

So what makes the most sense for such organizations – sit and wait, or start making all of the content and expertise available to users across the company now? Please post your thoughts below.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 8:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.