Enterprise Search Europe 2012 took place on 30-31 May in London, attracting an audience of over 100 from across Europe. Day 2 started off with three excellent case studies. Gerard Bredenoord (Knowledge Innovations) described the implementation of a global search solution for Linklaters, a major law firm which included an impressive array of ecstatic responses from people as they used the new search solution for the first time. Melissa Shaffer (Harvard Business School) then talked about the value of search analytics and now even a small level of effort can make a significant difference to search quality, especially in identifying content that users expect to be searchable but which has not been indexed. Damon Fordham (3i PLC) concluded the session with a description of an implementation of Coveo at this UK-owned investment fund. The problems of making sure that secure information was indeed secure were quite substantial.
At lunch there were some themed tabled which summed up the main themes of the conference, namely
- Big data
- Developments in search technology
- Mobile search
- Open source
- Search implementation
- SharePoint Search
In the afternoon sessions Bhupesh Pattni and Enda Flynn (Comperio) presented the Sprint 0 approach to developing a business case for search investment, and then Hans-Joseph Jeanrond (Sinequa) compared the “Sand Dune” and “Nugget approaches to business case development” before inviting Clement Yunes (Atos) to describe how his company developed a comprehensive search-based expertise identification application for 78,000 staff worldwide. Mobile search design for enterprise applications was the theme of a presentation by Tyler Tate (TwigKit) and then Tony Russell-Rose (UXLabs) described his work on the development of a taxonomy for enterprise search use cases.
The day ended with an open forum to ensure that any remaining delegate questions were answered and then Stephen Arnold (ArnoldIT) have a virtuoso closing keynote which in covering again the implications of mobile, big data and cloud applications brought the conference back full circle to where it began.
As Chairman of the Conference I would like to thank Information Today Inc. for its support and management of the conference. We also had superb support from the conference sponsors, Raytion (as Platinum sponsor) and Gold sponsors Comperio, Convotis, IntraFind, Search Technologies, Sinequa and Smartlogic. In 2011 ESE2011 took place in October, but for various reasons it had to be moved to May this year. Although the dates have not yet been finalised it will again be in May next year, hopefully even bigger and better. If you cannot wait that long then there is the Enterprise Search Summit Fall in Washington DC in October.
Martin White