The programme for Enterprise Search Europe 2013 has been published and you can start registering today. That might be a good idea as given the quality of the speakers and the programme (I should perhaps state that I’m the Conference Chair!) means it could be standing room only in the Hilton Olympia four months today. The three main changes this year are the introduction of workshops on 14 May, a programme aligned around a small number of current themes and a conference close timing on the second day which means that you can say to the end and still get a flight back home that evening.
The conference opens with a keynote from Ed Dale, Digital Platforms Product Manager at Ernst & Young taking about The Six Drivers for Search Quality. He is followed by Kristian Norling presenting the outcomes of the 2013 Findwise Enterprise Search and Findability Report. Next up come two of the global leaders in search user experience, Tyler Tate and Joe Lamantia, and then Stephen Arnold wraps up the morning by looking at Big Data vs Enterprise Search. And that is just the opening morning! In the afternoon there is a panel session on the future of open source search, leading into parallel sessions on open-source search implementation and on SharePoint search.
If I move to the end of the conference after lunch Kara Pernice (Nielsen Norman Group) will be taking about the work that NNGroup have carried out on intranet search usability, Valentin Richter (Raytion) discusses the challenges and benefits of migrating to a new search application and then I’m especially pleased that Lynda Moulton will be taking a look at the outcomes of the conference and giving us her perspective on the success factors for search deployment.
In between we have parallel sessions on SharePoint Search, Open-Source Search and Search Implementation good practice. There is also going to be what I think will be a very interesting session on Thursday. This will be a quick-fire set of presentations from search experts on what they see as the five decisions you have to make in 2013 to be prepared for 2014 onwards. There will be a vote on what delegates see as the top five overall, and we hope that everyone will go away with a very clear view of what to do when they get back to the office.
There are four half-day workshops on Tuesday 14 May covering Big Data (Matt Aslett, 451 Group), open source search (Charlie Hull, Flax), search interface optimisation (Tony Russell-Rose, UXLabs) and SharePoint 2013 search implementation planning (Christian Vogt and Christian Gross, Raytion).
This remains the only event in Europe that takes a business impact view of enterprise search, and the May timing enables you to go back to your organisation with all the inspiration, information and contacts you need to start work on business planning for search in 2014. There could not be a better RoI than that.
You can follow the conference on Twitter at #eseu and over the next few months there will be many interviews and updates on the conference web site.
If you are reading this in North America of course we’d be delighted to see you in London but there is also the Enterprise Search Summit in New York the following week with an equally strong programme.
Martin White